The Darnells, a husband and wife team of Egyptologists, combine scholarship, suspense, and adventure in Egypt’s Golden Couple. I have always been fascinated by Egyptology, so I particularly enjoyed this book. Like The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, Egypt’s Golden Couple is part history, part archeology, and part fiction. Each chapter opens with a scenario that is fictional but derived from known facts about the subjects. Even the backdrops of the scenes are based on actual paintings and bas-reliefs on the walls.
Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti have been portrayed in widely differing accounts and depicted as an incestuous tyrant or an innovator who affected nearly every aspect of Egyptian life. He established the world’s first monotheist religion. The images, the gold funerary mask of his son Tutankhamun (King Tut) and the painted bust of his wife Nefertiti, are among the most recognizable in the world, right up there with Vincent Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers.”
Akhenaten and Nefertiti transformed Egyptian solar worship from polytheism to monotheism. While doing so, they changed the face of Egyptian art and architecture. The Darnells weave a delightful story about these two rulers. I enjoyed the in-depth view of Egyptian life, but some readers may find it slow going, particularly in parts that talk about the difficulty of reading and translating heiroglyphs: The verb is written with three phonetic signs. The first sign is a chisel … which we can approximately pronounce as ‘ab’ …
Overall, this is a great read, but you need to have a real Egyptomania to read this, or be prepared to learn more about ancient Egypt that you might wish to.
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Egypt’s Golden Couple: When Akhenaten and Nefertiti Were Gods on Earth is available through:
The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women (St. Martin’s Press, August 31, 2021)by Nancy Marie Brownie available through:
You can see my review of The Real Valkyrie here
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