El Daly, Okasha, Egyptology: The Missing Millennium-Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings

This book opens up a whole new branch in Egyptology and I believe will someday be considered a seminal classic. It looks at the long-ignored, millennium-long Egyptian and Arab contribution to the field of Egyptology. By utilizing a large number of ignored Arabic sources, it sheds light on many aspects of ancient Egypt: mummification, religion, language, science, and even the fact that an equivalent of the Supreme Council of Antiquities and Zahi Hawass existed centuries ago. While it is an excellent beginning, this book only scratches the surface with regards to the types of insights that might be gleaned about ancient Egypt from Arabic sources, and points the way toward a myriad of possibilities for more in-depth research. It goes a long way toward demonstrating why Arabic should be a required language for all Egyptologists to learn alongside French and German, something that I have felt for a long time myself based on my own research in the field using such sources. Order now: