Sandro Vannini

A coffee-table book, but a really good one. The title is slightly misleading – this is not a general discussion of Egyptian royal mortuary practices (although there’s an introduction with pyramid pictures, pretty much obligatory for Egypt books), but is very tightly focused on tomb art in the Valley of the Kings. What’s more, it organizes the presentation by the type of art, not by tomb or time period – thus there are chapters on “The Litanies of Re”, “The Book of Gates”, “The Book of the Amduat”, and other “books” painted on royal tomb walls. (I should point out that even though these are traditionally called “books”, they only appear as paintings on royal tomb walls – commoners had a papyrus “Book of the Dead” and their tomb walls were painted with scenes from daily life, not instructions on how to get through the afterworld – the Amduat).

The photography is magnificent. This is a large format book, and almost every other page is a foldout – sometime a double foldout or even a facing-page double foldout, six pages altogether - of a tomb painting. I have no idea how the camera work was done; – the photographer, Sandro Vannini, is given credit by author Zahi Hawass for developing new photographic techniques. I’ve been in several of these tombs; space is extremely tight, yet the photographs show many feet of wall scenes without any of the distortion you’d get from an ultra-wide-angle lens.

There are some drawbacks; with so many large photographs, the text is a little sparse. Paintings from several tombs are often shown sequentially to illustrate an entire “book” - this is fine, since one tomb may have missing or damaged illustrations that are present elsewhere – but this is not directly credited in the text (although the locations for all photographs is included in the Appendix). This also makes it difficult to follow exactly the way the paintings were laid out; there’s considerable evidence that the arrangement of paintings was intended to symbolize the actual journey through the afterlife.

Definitely recommended, but ideally I’d couple it with The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife, which goes into much more detail on the history and meaning of the “books”, and Atlas of the Valley of the Kings, which has detailed maps of all the tombs. With those three, you should be ready for anything The Devourer of Souls or He Whose Face Is Turned Backwards can throw at you in the Amduat.… (meer)