Egypt adventure fiction - The Truth About Books

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Why children “totally get” ancient Egypt. Ask any school teacher.

“Bursting with life… a magnificent adventure playground.”

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.” 

“A game, daring future generations."

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 ostensibly for younger readers.

My series for young readers (written under the shortened name Roy Pond) was pretty 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’ and also ‘Egypt Breakout – Soldiers of an Endless Night.’

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, 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 Egypyptian, 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 ther 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…

Ancient Aliens? Ancient Egypt’s Imhotep – the Alien Intelligence

It must have seemed to early generations that Imhotep dropped from the sky

It's not surprising perhaps that people, amazed by the achievements of ancient Egypt, reach out for ancient aliens as an explanation.

I’ve always thought there was something a little alien about the little figure of Imhotep with his elongated skull inside a skullcap.

Let me say from the beginning, I have not defected to the “Ancient Aliens” camp, although I will probably be unable to resist the television show.

It’s just that I am in awe of this polymath whose fame preceded and overshadowed Leonardo da Vinci’s.

Imhotep must have seemed like a being who dropped out of the sky to early generations, too.

Imhotep’s luminous intelligence would have appeared utterly alien – history’s first recorded genius who was the father of medicine, the first great architect, who invented buildings in stone, including the archetypal step pyramid. Imhotep was deified and also revered by the Greeks and Romans.

All this and Imhotep governed as a Vizier and held high priestly office.

Imhotep, not surprisingly was strongly linked with Thoth, Egypt’s ibis-headed god of wisdom and magical power.

The mysterious figure of Imhotep plays a part in my novel “The Ibis Apocalypse”… an adventure thriller about the quest for the forbidden Stela of Thoth.

Here’s an excerpt.

They followed Melinda down into a large side chamber. It drew a gasp from Zara.

Had they stepped into a charnel house?

Body parts littered the floor and lay piled up against the walls, human legs, arms, the top halves of faces, a child’s head, calves and shins, hands, ears and eyes.

“Don’t worry. There hasn’t been a mass slaughter in here.”

Anson bent and picked up the face of a child.

“Anatomical donaria. Made of clay and plaster. Body parts and organs. See, this one’s a child’s head – it has a prominent ear in relief.”

Zara frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“The child was suffering from an ear malady.”

Melinda explained.

“These models of body parts are medical votive offerings left by sick pilgrims either as tokens of gratitude for healing or to induce Thoth to grant cures.”

“Wow. We’ve got to shoot this place,” Ben, the director-cameraman said.

The archaeologist went on.

“This site, and all catacombs filled with ibis and baboons, exist to seek cures,” she said. “Each bird was an offering by a pilgrim, given in thanks or in the hope of securing a cure. It shows that this was an important place of healing. Thoth, as the god of wisdom was also revered as the inventor of medicine and it was he who gave physicians their power to heal. You may recall Thoth’s iconography, a staff around which a serpent coils. It still represents the medical profession to this day and is the medical symbol world wide.”

HE FELT the pieces of anatomical donaria trying to fit together in his mind, combining into the form of one person and that person was Imhotep, the formal seated figure seen in countless museums.

Portrayed as a priest with a skull-cap, like the god Ptah, and holding a papyrus scroll across his knees, Imhotep was venerated as the patron of scribes who would traditionally spill a couple of drops of water on the floor in libation to him before beginning their writing.

History now recognised Imhotep as the true father of medicine who lived two thousand, two hundred years before the birth of Hippocrates. Today modern medicine acknowledged Imhotep as ‘the first figure of a physician to stand out clearly from the mists of antiquity’. Imhotep diagnosed and treated over two hundred diseases of the abdomen, bladder, rectum, the eyes, the skin, hair, nails and tongue. The great man treated tuberculosis, gallstones, appendicitis, gout and arthritis. He also performed surgery and practiced dentistry. He knew the position and function of the vital organs and about the circulation of the blood system. He was also something of a pharmacist, extracting medicine from plants…

The Anson Hunter Egypt fiction adventure series

"Ancient Egyptian magic in fiction."

Did the ancient Egyptians call on  malefic forces. Read this ancient Egypt adventure series and, like my renegade fictional Egyptologist Anson Hunter, you too may believe...


Magical - Egypt Efiction

Did the ancient Egyptians use malefic forces? Egypt Efiction.

My renegade fictional Egyptologist Anson Hunter engages with dangers from the ancient past, at his peril.

Curses of fiery destruction, plagues and pestilence have a long history. They go back much earlier than Jahweh’s curse upon Egypt in Exodus.

The first occasion occurred when Ra, Egypt’s sun god, hurled an execration upon a rebellious humankind and, in a hot rage, despatched the scorching Eye of Ra to destroy them, a holocaust sun in the form of the goddess Sekhmet-Hathor, a marauding lioness, her breath spreading pestilence and plague and her claws bringing death as she swept through Egypt in an orgy of killing. 

Egypt Efiction

 

"Ancient Egyptian magic - in fiction"

"Huge" "Terrific" - 2 ancient Egypt stories for young at heart readers

Ancient Egypt magic 

 

THE PRINCESS WHO LOST HER
SCROLL OF THE DEAD
“One terrific story...” --
N. Ignatowicz, Editor-at-Large, Children’s
Books, New York.

EGYPT BREAKOUT - SOLDIERS OF AN
ENDLESS NIGHT
“Huge animation potential. Loved
the gentle storytelling voice, the
characters and story, especially
Karoy." --E. Lidbury, Editor, Children's Fiction, UK

Why I prefer ancient Egypt E-fiction to dead-tree technology...

Egypt Efiction - living e-books sell a long dead civilization

I never thought I'd say it.

While I sell fiction in both forms, I get far more satisfaction from selling my series of ancient Egypt adventure thrillers in e-book form than in paperbacks.

Maybe I'm just over the dead-tree technology of paper publishing.

There's something alive and immediate about e-books that breathes new life into reading - and being read.

E-books are fresh, for a start - they avoid the glacial slowness of book publishing and literary agencies.


E-books seem to me to be the perfect medium for capturing and sharing the quicksilver nature of ideas.

Yet, ironically, there is a permanence about e-books that paper, and even papyrus, could never achieve. 

E-books don't go out of print, either. They are forever. 

They don't yellow, fade, gather mildew, dust and eventually rot.


In fact there is some of the permanence about e-books that I admire in the ancient Egyptian civilization itself.

So for me it's the perfect way to bring ancient Egypt to life for my readers.

Blog of The Renegade Egyptologist, Anson Hunter

My fictional Egyptologist hero Anson Hunter has his own blog

It reads like a fiction-hero's stream of consciousness blog - a Nile River of consciousness... thoughts and theories of a controversial outsider in Egyptology and archaeology.

Anson Hunter says of himself in 'About Me':

My blog runs through my life like a stream of consciousness, or should I say, a Nile river of consciousness... I am described as having a beanpole elevation and my ex-wife said I have the shining eyes of a fanatic. I'm fascinated by the parallels of ancient Egypt and the faith-based religions. I am an Anglican, but God probably wouldn't agree, since I'm a contradiction who harbours some old fashioned Christian beliefs and yet also believes in unseen realities. As a phenomenologist I believe you have to engage with the sacred and grant value to ancient beliefs in order to grasp them. For some reason my controversial ideas about dangers from the ancient past have brought the intelligence community into my world...as well as New Age and new world order conspirators who take their inspiration from ancient Egypt and the mystery religions...

You can visit his blog here 

WHO WAS SHE? The Girl on The Train Wore An Ancient Egyptian Bracelet…

Was the alluring young woman on the train to London bait for an Egyptologist?

SPEED blurred the Oxfordshire greenery flashing by outside the train window as Anson Hunter sat at work on a laptop.

“You won’t mind if I sit next to you,” the voice of a young woman said.

His fingers stopped tapping the keys.

A sultry young woman in black slid into the seat beside him.

Irksome. Did she have to box him in? There were other seats in the carriage. Still, it could be worse - a man. Not homophobia on his part, he reasoned, more a sort of bonhomie phobia, an aversion to garrulous fellow travellers who interrupted his theorising. He vastly preferred the more reserved company of females on trains, buses and aeroplanes.

He tried to ignore her arrival and continued writing the blog:

Anson Hunter’s Blog -The Other Egypt

The sun disc of Ra, symbol of life and searing death, was central to the mythology of the Egyptians. Ironically today in the twenty-first century, we are again obsessed with the sun, heart of the burning issue of climate change.

Our lives and our future revolve around the sun, just as they did in the most ancient times of Egypt.

And now I fear a return attack of an ancient, holocaust sun and the reactivation of an apocalypse of global scorching, plague and pestilence…

The new arrival brushed against Anson’s arm and he glimpsed a flash of jewellery on her wrist. He did not look at her, but kept working.

But now the letters on the keyboard dissolved and swam.

His glance swung aside to her bracelet, lingered there, then tracked up the arm and body of a curvy young woman dressed in black to dark eyes under amused brows and then travelled back down to the bracelet again.

Shining on her wrist was a solid gold, rigid bracelet, inset with images. Profoundly archaic. Undoubtedly authentic. The carriage seemed to give a judder as if jolted by a locomotive in a shunting yard. Synchronicity? Or was this a sign of what he feared? He met the eyes of the stranger.

“Genuine Egyptian?” he said.

She smiled. “I’m Egyptian born. But of Greek ancestry, like Cleopatra.”

“I meant the bracelet.”

“You noticed it before you noticed me,” she said.

“I’m in the ancient Egypt trade.”

She sighed. “Yes, this is Egyptian. And I’m Alexia.”

His mind raced ahead of the train. Where was this going? She had ambushed him to show him the relic. Why? Because of his obsessive theorizing on the Internet? Recollections of a notorious event in archaeological history flashed through his mind like the country house in a field outside the train window.

The Dorak Affair.

A British professor of archaeology, James Mellaart, while travelling on a train to the port of Izmir in Turkey, noticed a bracelet on the arm of an attractive young woman. The piece bore the typological style of jewellery found at Troy -the first glimpse of a tantalising treasure recovered from an unknown site. Mellaart had little difficulty in engaging her in conversation and she introduced herself as Anna Papastrati. Yes, this bracelet was part of an ancient collection and she had more to show him if he really wanted to see it.

Under conditions of secrecy, Anna took the professor back to her apartment in Izmir. Here she revealed evidence of a staggering hoard, bronze-age objects from an Anatolian seafaring civilization neighbouring the Trojans that existed at the time of the Egyptians, four and a half thousand years ago. He saw statuettes of an electrum goddess and her handmaidens, fabulous golden jewellery, swords, daggers and ceremonial axe heads, including a sheet of gold embossed with hieroglyphs identifying Pharaoh Sahure, revealing early links with Egypt.

Mellaart must have felt the breath of good fortune on his neck, yet doubtless he could scarcely breathe. Might he borrow an object or two, take photos?

No. Anna was firm. She was not yet ready to release the story of the collection. But she would permit him to stay and make drawings of the artefacts, so long as he agreed to an embargo. He must wait for her approval before releasing information about the find. Mellaart agreed readily to her terms. He stayed with Anna for almost four days, making drawings of the artefacts.

“I need to take a closer look,” Anson said to the attractive stranger sitting beside him on the train to London.

“Not at me, I’m sure you mean. You’re more interested in this.”

He sized up his new travelling companion. Fair skinned yet darkly alluring. Yes, she fitted the bill. A little daring and mysterious.

She held up her arm for his inspection and he caught a wisp of perfume as he cradled it in his hand and drew it closer for scrutiny. The arm felt cool and creamily soft in texture.

The heavy gold bracelet was hinged on a gold pin, two half-cylinders that clipped together in a band, another gold pin forming the clasp. On alternate panels were turquoise inlaid images of Hathor in a very early form, a female face, cow-eared and horned, and beside each Hathor-head an image of her alter-ego, Sekhmet, a lioness in fiery red carnelian.

It was as jolting as seeing a snake coiled on her arm.

The implications made his thoughts blur like the passing greenery.

History, or a sensational episode of it, was repeating itself…

(Excerpt from The Hathor Holocaust)

"Totally Spooky" - the ancient Egypt computer game series of young novels - Now on Kindle

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Discover Cousin Harry's totally spooky Egypt computer games...

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BOOK SCENE: Anson Hunter recites Egypt’s Book of the Dead to avoid certain death..

"I would enjoy watching the scene where Anson Hunter recites a prayer from one chapter of the Book of the Dead to avoid certain death..." Reviewer

“The plot unfolds like a box office hit… I would enjoy watching the scene where Anson Hunter recites a prayer from one chapter of the Book of the Dead to unravel the engineering secrets of Ancient Egypt and manages to escape from certain death in the entrails of the Devourer” – Egypt Then and Now

When the ground stopped shaking, they shone their flashlights around the chamber. They were trapped inside a sealed heart of the labyrinth, with no way back or forward.

Our hearts have failed the test. We have been found sinful, the thought hit Anson. We’re stuck in the heart of the tomb.

"I think we've just had a coronary shut down," he informed them. He looked at Kalila, then at the Coptic monk Daniel and his nephews. “Any ideas?”

"There must be some mechanism that opens it again,"Daniel said. "We must find it! Start looking, I suggest.”

They all joined in a search of the walls and floors, as they hunted for hidden levers or mechanisms that might open the doors, pressing individual blocks of stone, running fingers between cracks.

Sound above their heads put a stop to their efforts.

Something was happening in the ceiling. Anson listened. Hissing sounds. Small apertures had opened in the roof. Red streams ran softly into the chamber.

"Blood!"

"Not blood, after three thousand years." Daniel bent and scooped up a handful. He sniffed it. "Clay dust," he muttered.

It wasn't blood, but it could kill them just as surely as any liquid.

"It's symbolic blood, dry red clay from Elephantine,” Anson said. “The red is haematite, iron oxide. In ancient legends red clay often took the place of blood when mixed with wine or water. I think this dust represents the blood of Osiris."

"If we don't get out of here soon, it will choke us," Kalila said, giving voice to their fears.

They redoubled their efforts to find a lever. They ran their hands like nervous spiders over the walls.

The powder-blood flowing into the heart gathered in piles around their feet. The streams were running faster.

Kalila coughed. Fine dust filled the air. It would suffocate them long before it covered their heads.

"Keep looking!" Daniel urged them.

"There’s nothing," Kalila said.

"It is a mechanical trap," he insisted. "There must be something that will open it again."

Anson watched the streams of red dust particles falling from the ceiling. Then the world brightened as an idea floated down to him.

“As light as a feather?” he said. “What human being is so innocent? That’s it. No human being is that light.

We have to change ourselves, take on the forms of the gods. Before the dead can go on to take their place in the realm of Osiris, they had to say a spell that would change the parts of their bodies into the parts of gods.”

His eyes swept around the walls at the carved reliefs of the gods and goddesses, the torch beam turning the dust into clouds of blood.

Red dust piled up around their ankles. Anson felt the dust tickling his lungs. Daniel covered his mouth with his shirtsleeve, spluttering.

“What were the parts that must change?” Anson said.

He banged his forehead with the palm of her hand, trying to jolt his memory.

 “Think, brain. Think. The Chapter of Coming forth by Day. The Papyrus of Ani...”

The red dust turned the air into a blood storm, as if blood had already filled the chamber to its roof.

“There’s no way to open that door,” Daniel said.

“Then we’ll all die, unless we can think of a way,” Kalila said.

“I’ve got it, I think. We’re going to need a bit of divine help,” Anson said. The powder blood billowed up into their faces and seeped into their clothes. He waded through it, sinking up to his ankles.

“Am I right?” he said, with a rasp of dust in his throat.” Is there an order to this?” He reached the wall.

“ The dead must take on the parts of the gods. Which gods and in which order?”

The powder was in their lungs and it tasted metallic like blood.

Anson recalled the prayer of the papyrus of Ani.

“My eyes must become the eyes of Hathor...” he said.

Hathor stood with a crown of cow horns and a solar disc between them, her lithe form rippling in the blocks of stone. He reached up to Hathor’s face and pressed the eye. A block grated back into the wall.

He twisted, face alight with relief. “I haven’t lost my touch. We’ve got to choose the parts of the gods and so change ourselves. Each part of a human body has to become a part of a god... The eyes of the dead must become the eyes of Hathor, his face the face of Ra, his cheeks the cheeks of Isis, the backbone that of Seth, the buttocks of Horus, the phallus of Osiris, the thighs of Nut, the feet of Ptah...”

Each part had to change into a god.

Anson went around the wall, brushing past the others who had covered their faces and were trying to sift the dust-laden air through their fingers.

Powder blood rose past their knees to their thighs…

Excerpt from "The Smiting Texts", first in my Egypt adventure thriller series of novels.

The Anson Hunter books… and other Egypt fiction titles.

The Night Ancient Egypt's Dangers Came To Visit Me

A strange but true confession as a fiction writer about my passion for ancient Egypt ...

I’d never seen my lifelong pursuit of ancient Egypt as inviting an encounter with unseen forces... and yet...


I write a series of novels about a renegade Egyptologist, Anson Hunter, who believes in dangers from the ancient past.

And perhaps it’s no wonder I identify so strongly with him and his 'self-destructive’ theories that make him an outsider in his profession.

On two separate occasions in my life I’ve experienced the shattering impact of a mysterium tremendum and it’s not something that I can easily bring myself to admit.

The episodes were embarrassingly spiritualist in nature. (Like my hero Anson Hunter, I wrestle with a faith. We both call ourselves Anglicans, but God probably wouldn't agree.) 

These events occurred, not in one of my many visits to Egypt, nor in a tomb or temple, but while asleep in my bed at home.

I had surfaced from deep sleep to feel my body shaking violently as something descended onto my back and slammed me to the mattress.

The presence paralysed me, pinning me down, like the crushing effects of an anaesthetic.

It welded itself to my spine and to the back of my head like an alien predator in a movie. It felt like a shadow, even though I could not see it. Whatever it was, it did not speak, yet it seemed to be clinging to the back of my brain where it waited and watched as patiently as a parasite.

I could not cry out nor could I break its frightening, determined hold. Something, I knew, was trying to take  over me.

What was this terrifying ambush?

Night paralysis?

Or was it the attack of some elemental?

Thoughts of Egypt came into my mind and I wondered - has my obsession opened the door to this? I’ve given years to the study of Egypt’s mystery, and am I now being asked to give more, my very being?

How could I shake myself free when every muscle lay paralysed? 

I didn’t know where to go to escape it.

I tried to will the paralysis away with the power of my mind, hoping to break its hold with the force of concentration. I was cold and yet sweated.

It would not move and neither could I move.

Its breath lay on my neck and remained there.

It’s watching my struggle, I thought. No worse, smiling, demon-like.

Prayer. There was nothing else. I fled to the refuge of an uncertain faith. Christ, help me, I prayed. This, and only this, broke the hold. The shadow finally relaxed its clasp and let go of me, not immediately, but after some moments of thought. It dissolved away. I had passed some kind of test.

Yet it happened again, ten years later, A second attack?

Both events left me feeling profoundly shaken and puzzled as well as embarrassed and tinged with guilt. I’d never seen my pursuit of ancient Egypt as an encounter with evil but now I was forced to consider the possibility that some element of it could be hostile to my life and to my wellbeing and might always be waiting.

Anson Hunter novels