Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

What Hacker News says

1. redzediAug 2023
   The rise and fall of ancient egypt by Toby wilkinson.
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2. sho_hnJul 2026
   I'm not widely read in history (though I've been improving of late), but for what it's worth, my favorite book on history "beyond Greece and Rome" so far has been Charles C. Mann's 1491. In fact, it's one of the best and most illuminating books I've read, period.

   It has about the information/idea density of a Neal Stephenson novel (a good one), and is about equally a pageturner.

   I've also adored all of Jimmy Maher's (better known as The Digital Antiquarian) amateur history books, his Wonders of the World series - I think the one on Chinese history was especially ambitious and nice.

   I enjoyed Toby Wilkinson's The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, but it's a bit one-note; still looking for the Egyptian history book I'll fall in love with, though as as a general map it's quite good.

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3. HuShifangApr 2022
   Well, I am a working professional historian of the premodern world, and this is certainly my impression from years of reading Chinese-language primary sources about China during the Shang, Zhou, Qin, and Han dynasties. Spend some time with the literature, and you'll read how Mohists coupled careful logic and quasi-scientistic reasoning with "ghosts who will punish you if you're bad," about how Han dynasty tomb exterior-door inscriptions talk extensively about how the decedent's family loves them but earnestly hopes to never, ever see them again, because if they did it would mean the decedent left their tomb to punish them for their unfilial conduct. (And you'll read how gingerly the subject of human sacrifice in the distant past, or emperors indulging itinerant "Daoist" rainmakers, to the considerable chagrin of more secular-minded officials, is handled.) I can't point to anything synoptic on the Chinese case -- early China scholars tend to make a lot (frankly too much) out of a little (we don't have that many texts -- but Herbert Fingarette's "Confucius: The Secular as Sacred" was formative for all the early China people I studied with on a more intellectual register. One controversy that gets lots of play: whether Confucius urged performing the rituals "as if" the dead were present, or if they were actually present. Linguistically, the phrasing is entirely open to the latter, even if people like to make the thinking presented in the "Analects" out to be more modern-seeming. At the risk of giving too much of a peek behind the curtain, so to speak, broadly speaking -- this being several decades since Foucault made his mark -- careers get made by either emphasizing the past's surprising lack of alterity or by finding some spectacular, flamboyantly surprising new form of alterity. And the former is rather easier to pull off than the latter.

   But, I read about the piles of genitalia in Toby Wilkinson's "The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt" and about the god-statues in Trevor Bryce's "Babylonia: A Very Short Introduction."

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