This is a new library book that I can heartily recommend. The author does a brilliant job of meeting the goals he set out to accomplish: it is short; yet it is a complete 5,000-year history of Egypt; and he never gets bogged down in what could easily be diversionary tangents, as so many other books like this wind up doing. I picked it up because, with things going on the way they have this year in Egypt, it is topical and even active readers need help through books like this to assess what’s happened and where things might be going.
Tignor presents history up to and through Mubarak, winding up with a final section titled, “What Happens After Mubarak?” The author clarifies that the revolutionary movement, known as kifaya, has been active since 2005. Kifaya means “enough.”
The book left me with three new impressions that will stick with me for some time to come, as events in Egypt continue to unfold:
a.) Up until the 21st century, where everything now is electronically equidistant, Egypt had been geographically, the center of the occidental world. While maybe some would say, of course, that this is obvious, it is the cultural impact of this condition which begins to soak in as the history rolls by century by century, millenia by millenia. This is not to say that the center has the biggest armies or the most money or even power. But in most life forms, the surroundings feed the center. Picture an apple or an orange; the extremities are protection; the main pulp is the food and juice feeding the center, where the seeds for future propogation are found and nutured. For millenia, Egypt was the repository of world knowledge, education was revered; the population was cross-fertlized by almost every other race, creed, and color. A true melting pot.
b.) One of the manifestations of being the center is that all the big empires and great conquerors throughout histor
y lusted after ownership of Egypt: Alexander and Bonaparte, the Ottamans and the Arabs. Up until the 20th century, Egypt was prized because of being the bread-basket of the world. This was because of the 4,000-mile long Nile River, which uniquely blessed Egypt by winding up running through the length of the country, bounded by a long range of mountains along the Red Sea, and forcing the river to overflow inland every year. Agriculture became far less important during the 20th century, and thus the Aswan Dam has switched Egypt to an energy-based economy.
y lusted after ownership of Egypt: Alexander and Bonaparte, the Ottamans and the Arabs. Up until the 20th century, Egypt was prized because of being the bread-basket of the world. This was because of the 4,000-mile long Nile River, which uniquely blessed Egypt by winding up running through the length of the country, bounded by a long range of mountains along the Red Sea, and forcing the river to overflow inland every year. Agriculture became far less important during the 20th century, and thus the Aswan Dam has switched Egypt to an energy-based economy. c.) The third thing that gives one pause when thinking it through from a different perspective is religion. We don’t make fun of the Greeks or the Romans, the Angles or the Saxons for their multiple God religions. But we do make fun of the Pharaohs for believing they were the descendants of their one God. We also laugh at mummification, but don’t some of us send our body parts, sperm and/or DNA off into space (hoping for aliens to find and fix us?), or on ice in millennial refrigerators, waiting for … .. some future “God” to wake us up and renew our lives?
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