Ancient Egypt

Egypt from Menes to the Persian conquest, written when the hieroglyphs had been readable for fifty years and the dynastic lists were still being argued over. Rawlinson was Camden Professor at Oxford and the brother of the man who deciphered cuneiform. He is confident where later work has corrected him, and excellent on the land itself: the river, the seasons, the making of a kingdom out of a flood. Twenty-eight plates by painters including Frederic Leighton and Jean-Léon Gérôme carry the temples, sphinxes and Nile craft that Rawlinson's Egypt describes.