The Nile
Downriver through Egypt’s Past and Present
Toby Wilkinson
Having read it
★★★★☆
Solid read. The early chapters were very interesting, but it declined in quality a tad as we visited places and times that seemed a bit too contemporary for the overall subject. However, it was expertly handled and made a stream of water quite interesting!
A good passage
No wonder that the ancient Egyptians themselves, when considering their origins, considered the southern Nile Valley in general, and Nekhen in particular, as the crucible of civilisation, the place where Egypt began.
A second good passage
With academic status and some measure of financial security, Pertie was able to devote each winter season to excavation. His dig at Nagada in the winter of 1894 was a model of his trademark meticulousness. In three months, he and his assistant James Quibell cleared two thousand graves. Perite careful noted the contents of each burial, especially the pottery, on a slip of card. His scientific intuition suggested to him that by tracking gradual change in the style of pottery, it would be possible to place the graves in the relative chronological order. So he arranged and rearranged the slips of card until each type of pottery displayed a smooth evolution in its form. The result was Pertie’s famous ‘sequence dating system’, the very first example of the now standard technique of archaeological seriation. To this day, it remains the nest method for dating artefacts and tomb-groups from Egypt’s prehistoric past: pots as a proxy for period.