A History of Egypt: From Earliest Times to the Present

No country’s past can match Egypt’s in antiquity, richness, and variety. Rarely, however, is this nation’s history presented as a comprehensive panorama, since scholars tend to divide it into distinct eras―pharaonic, Greco-Roman, Coptic, medieval Islamic, Ottoman, and modern―that are rarely studied in connection to each other, despite the strong elements of continuity running through all of these periods. But here, historian Jason Thompson has written a cohesive account of Egypt’s millennia-long past.



In A History of Egypt, readers are offered a sure guide through the sometimes labyrinthine corridors of Egypt’s past, from the mysterious predynastic kingdoms to the nation-state of the twenty-first century. The author addresses central scholarly issues such as how Egyptian history can be treated as a whole and how the west has shaped prevailing images of it, both through direct contact and through the lens of western scholarship. Drawing on current historical scholarship as well as his own research, Jason Thompson has written a remarkable work of synthesis and concision, offering students, travelers, and general readers alike an engaging one-volume narrative of the extraordinarily long course of human history by the Nile.