books 2007: Ancient Lives, by John Romer

Full title: Ancient Lives: The Story of the Pharaohs' Tombmakers. Heather sent me this. I admit I wasn't too excited at first, but once I started reading, I realized this book is really cool. It's the story of the village people who made the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, based on their own accounts. For 300 years, during the 19th and 20th dynasties, the people in this village trained as stoneworkers and artists and scribes, and they dug and decorated and made sacred the pharaohs' tombs. The scribes kept detailed accounts of their working materials, their payments, and their arguments. Because tombs were their trade, the villagers made really excellent and detailed tombs for themselves; they also kept shrines to the gods, and scratched graffiti all over the desert valleys in the area. There's just a ton of material about these people, and there have been some excellent excavations of the village and cemeteries, and the result is that there is so much information about them--not just where they lived and what they did and what they ate, but their names and their families and their petty disagreements, what they believed in, who they really were. I thought this book was fascinating.