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| Ancient Egypt -“A game, daring future generations." |
As well as my adult Egyptian adventure novels, I have a range of titles for young readers now on Kindle (and some in paperback) under the name Roy Pond.
Ancient Egypt’s appeal for different generations was the subject of some interesting research in a book called “Consuming ancient Egypt” (UCL Press.)
On the subject of the appeal of ancient Egypt in museums, respondents in focus groups revealed fascinating insights.
Children found ancient Egypt to be “bursting with life… a magnificent adventure playground.”
Young males viewed Egypt’s funerary practices as “a game, daring future generations” to find the treasures of the pharaohs.
General audiences regarded ancient Egypt as “sealed in a bubble in which pharaohs, pyramids, slaves, tombs and Cleopatra float around in a rich soup.”
Ancient Egypt is a realm of magic and mystery where time and reality are suspended, a concept as much as a place. It crosses the generation gap.
I hope I have too, publishing both adult archaeological thrillers and a series of novels for younger readers.
My series for young readers (written under the shortened name Roy Pond) was popular with schools in the US and Australia (THE MUMMY’S REVENGE… is Deadly” and “Who knows the secret of THE MUMMY’S TOMB.”). So too have been The Tomb Travellers series and of course ‘The Princess Who Lost Her Scroll of the Dead;.
By way of explaining the appeal of ancient Egypt for children, in one of my adult novels (The Hathor Holocaust) the renegade archaeological hero, adventurer, theorist and blogger Anson Hunter, confesses in his blog:
Something about Egypt hit me as a child, as it does many thoughtful children; in my obsessive case, a broken family possibly accelerated an inward turn.
The look of ancient Egypt is not only remote and eerie to a child, but also, paradoxically, second nature. Take a look at any child’s sketches and paintings. They’re eerily Egyptian, capturing the visible essence of things. The human body is often shown side on in the Egyptian way, just as it appears in tomb paintings and carved on temple walls, the shoulders turned to the front so that both arms are revealed and one foot placed ahead of the other.
Objects –tables, piles of food and fruit, animals, trees – float mysteriously in the air with disregard for scale. Young people understand ancient Egyptian art and design instinctively. They get it. It’s how they see the world – eternal, free of time and perspective.
A child’s view of Egypt is precious, I’ve come to believe. It almost seems that only as a child can you truly enter the Kingdom of Phaaoh. A child loves Egypt’s tombs, underworlds filled with glowing mages, temples that shiver in the heat of the sun, pyramids terrifying in their size, smooth statues of pharaohs and queens in dark stone, goddesses with long tresses, gods with animal heads.
Young people also have a sunny love of life, just as the Egyptians did, and yet both share a dark, hidden world of mystery and magic where animals can speak and where powerful unseen forces outside of their control influence events.
Children know a place that older people forget, a shadowy underworld of animal-headed monsters and fearsome creatures. Young people love a secret, and what civilisation was so steeped in secrets and mystery as ancient Egypt, from its hieroglyphs and hidden tombs to its mummies and spells for the afterlife? When small children go to bed, to the little death-sleep at night, don’t they take their treasured possessions with them on their journey, their toys and dolls to accompany them into an afterlife of dreams?
And what of Egypt itself, pyramids and stone pharaohs carved out of mountains, and soaring temples? A place built, as if from a child’s imagination, for giants.
With the average age at death of Egyptians being in the twenties, a case can be made for saying that it was young people who built the wonders of Egypt.
Put a child in a sandpit and what will it soon start to build? A pyramid of sand.
And think of the scenes in Egyptian tombs, those walls and painted passages that fling their lengths hundreds of metres into a cliff. The decorated walls show feasting, families fishing on boats on the river, flowers, fields and animals. They are not places of gloom like a modern graveyard. They are filled with scenes as bright and colourful as any child’s nursery.
Ancient Egypt is a place of wonders where anything seems possible. Little wonder that so many young people fall in love with it for a lifetime.
A child’s Egypt has never quite let go of me either…
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