“Man perishes; his corpse turns to dust; all his relatives pass away. But writings make him remembered in the mouth of the reader. A book is more effective than a well-built house or a tomb-chapel in the west, better than an established villa or a stela in the temple!”
Those prescient lines were written over 3,000 years ago, in ancient Egypt. They are part of a new book offering fresh translations of Egyptian hieroglyphics by Toby Wilkinson, an Egyptologist at the University of Cambridge. For the book, called “Writings From Ancient Egypt“, he gathered texts from poets, scribes, priests, storytellers and everyday citizens spanning some 2,000 years of Egyptian civilization to present a tantalizingly personal glimpse into a society defined today mostly by pyramids and mummies.
