Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt

The historian Herodotus described Egypt as a land of wonders and the Egyptians as extraordinarily religious. In her latest book, Joyce Tyldesley tells the story of Ancient Egypt through its wealth of myths, legends and tales. This absorbing volume skilfully weaves together storytelling and scholarship. The result is an eminently readable guide to a fascinating and complex subject.

In Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt Tyldesley takes on the more than 3,000-year span from the beginnings of the dynastic age to the suicide of Cleopatra and the Roman conquest (c. 3100-30 BC). During this lengthy period, Egypt endured internal crises and intervals of foreign rule, and encountered the powerful Classical civilisations. Ancient Egypt’s mythological canvas is equally vast and can be confounding. Gods and goddesses numbered in the hundreds and many had several names, aspects and physical appearances. Tyldesley vividly recreates and guides us through this complex mythological cosmos, showing how, over time, gods and their mythologies developed and transformed, intertwined and merged and were reinvented and manipulated to political ends. Through all of this, the linked themes of the king’s divine rule and the preservation of order (maat) endured.

Moving easily and confidently across the millennia, Tyldesley carefully explains the symbolism, interconnections, ambiguities and apparent contradictions of Egyptian myth. She employs a broad definition of ‘legend’, and this allows her to include Egypt’s entertaining and illuminating fictional and quasi-historical narratives. The source material – both textual and archaeological – is often challenging, but Tyldesley highlights the difficulties and pitfalls facing the modern scholar and (as far as possible) locates her material in its social, historical and intellectual context.

The book is structured around full and evocative retellings of Egypt’s many myths and stories and Tyldesley has a disarming ability to draw the modern reader into the ancient tale. However, she offers much more than a reconstruction of a mythological world. Exploring the stories and the beliefs they reflect, she paints a vivid picture of the land, its rulers and its people – how they lived and thought and their changing hopes and fears for a life after death. She ranges widely across the field of Egyptology, exploring topics that include the relationship between myth and cult, the development of temple and pyramid architecture and the mechanics and meaning of mummification. The reader learns how the Egyptian calendar developed, about the intricacies and tensions of Egyptian politics and the science, myth and magic of medicine.

Egypt’s powerful and fiercely protective goddesses and her women – from Cleopatra and the female pharaoh Hatshepsut to the woman in the street – receive equal attention. Tyldesley provides interesting insights into the legal status of Egyptian women (apparently equal to that of men, although appearances can be deceptive), the realities of childbirth, the possibility of a now largely lost female oral mythological tradition and the conceptualisation of a woman’s life after death in the context of a mythology that linked resurrection with male sexual potency.

Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt is stylishly written and attractively presented. Diagrams and illustrations within the text, as well as notes and appendices (including a glossary of Egyptian gods and heroes and a chronological framework) are particularly helpful for the non-specialist reader, who should find this work entirely accessible. Tyldesley emerges once again as a master storyteller able to bring to life the tales of a distant age.