Saturday, August 31, 2013

Monday, August 26, 2013

MY ANCIENT EGYPT: Enter an author’s world of reality and mysterious unseen realities

Reality vs unseen realities

When you read a novel, you always enter the author’s world and reality.


In my Anson Hunter Series you also enter a world of unseen realities, forces and influences.


Such as the the malefic potency of Egyptian execration or cursing texts in ‘The Smiting Texts’ and the frightening power of the Stone Book of Thoth in the ‘The Ibis Apocalypse’.


Then there is the real world of dangers in secret guerrilla archaeology. Such as the perilous discovery of the lost Great Labyrinth of Egypt in ‘The Smiting Texts’, a second, hidden Great Sphinx in ‘Egypt Eyes’ the Lost Library of Thoth and Seshat in ‘The Forbidden Glyphs’ and the secret hiding place of the banned gods of Egypt in 'The God Dig.'
 
Readers also enter a world of global conspiracies, Intelligence agencies, satellite archaeology and ruthless adversaries in the form of religious extremists and mysterious New World Order and New Age groups who take their impetus from ancient Egypt and its mystery religions.


In separate novels and novellas, the supranormal becomes reality in 'Text Messages from Eternity', 'The Egyptian Mythology Murders', 'The Obelisk Prophecy' and "Curse of the Crocodile Queen...





Monday, August 19, 2013

Fiction's investigative archaeologist - an intense relationship with ancient Egypt and its mysteries

Enter the world of Anson Hunter in a series of six novels about modern conspiracy and ancient hidden dangers




The Anson Hunter series are stand-alone novels that can be read in any order.

Which is your favourite?



 LOOK INSIDE - at AMAZON KINDLE


Friday, August 16, 2013

Can just a LOOK INSIDE sample read tell all? By an Egypt archaeology adventure thriller writer

I have just been asked to review 'Travels in Elysium', am archaeology adventure by UK author William Azuski.

Unfortunately I'm up to my ears in archaeological intrigue with next book, so I could only offer this Kindle 'Look inside' review:

"Can just a LOOK INSIDE sample tell all?

I am presently locked in mortal composition with my next novel, so I dare not break off to read and review a complete book.

However, I did take time out to "Look Inside" William's book 'Travels in Elysium' on Amazon Kindle (as I recommend other adventure lovers to do) and I can report that the sample I read has goaded me into new efforts in my own writing.

William has beautiful words in him and an enviable sense of atmosphere. Barely a lazy sentence. A pleasure to savour.

His rankings on Amazon should be vastly higher than they are and I wish him the success he plainly deserves.

I can at least award his novel's opening five stars!"


Can you judge a book by its sample?

(I invite you to look my Anson Hunter Egyptian archaeology adventure series, beginning with The Smiting Texts)

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

What is the frightening power of the Stela of Thoth? The Ibis Apocalypse

Thoth as a baboon

-->
“What is the power of the Stela? It’s a work of rather frightening thaumaturgy, a forbidden tome on stone said to have been composed by the Lord of Divine Words, Thoth, the god symbolised by an ibis, or by a cynocephalus baboon, ‘Mighty in his Wonderworking Formulae’. Thoth was the mysterious source of power of all amulets, spells and invocations of the gods, and inside this book was said to be all the magic of the world, the source of spiritual technology and power. It came with a reputation, a blurb along these lines…”

Anson flashed words on to the screen:

When you read this work, you will behold and possess the powers of the earth, the sky, the waters, the infernal regions of the abyss - the underworld, that is - the mountains, beasts, birds, creatures, reptiles, the fishes of the darkest sea, as well as the magical powers of the gods of Egypt themselves...

“In short, you would be established on high in this world and, in the Egyptians’ words, have the ability to work great wonders. It’s my belief that this forbidden Stela not only exists but its contents have resurfaced at several stages in history, all convulsive periods. I am convinced that they may be re-appearing in our time, judging by the current state of the planet.”

Sunday, August 11, 2013

‘The power and mystery of Egyptian mythology meets the adventure of archaeology in this fiction collection’

Enjoy the heady mix of mythology and archaeological adventure




The Smiting Texts
The Hathor Holocaust
The Ibis Apocalypse
The Anubis Intervention
Egypt Eyes
The Forbidden Glyphs

The Ra Virus
The Isis Obsession
The Delta Dilemma



Fiction with the power of myth and fact - on Amazon Kindle

Thursday, August 8, 2013

Imagine if the ancient Egyptians were right about taking it with you when you die



Would we arrive empty handed?


"The ancient Egyptians had a firm conviction that you could take it all with you when you died, provided your worldly goods were placed in your tomb with you.

Food, wine, furniture, games, weapons, treasures...

They believed that the afterlife would be a continuation of life on the Nile, only better, but with the same sorts of challenges.

Imagine if we woke up in the next life to learn that they were right - only the ancient Egyptians own any stuff. 

The rest of us have landed there empty handed.

But of course not many ancients retained their worldly goods for long with the systematic depredation of tomb robbers - and of archaeology..."

One of the musings by Anson Hunter, fiction's adventurer Egyptologist, in an upcoming new book in the series...

Meet Anson Hunter in the archaeological adventure series
- Amazon Kindle

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Enter ancient Egypt's Lost Labyrinth, realm of the croc god Sobek (The Smiting Texts)


Sobek, Luxor Museum

THEY MOVED carefully through the next section of the labyrinth.

The passage abruptly widened into a cavern filled with water. They saw two lakes, like large swimming pools, one shaped like a stomach, the other like the liver. The water, stale and brackish, looked as dark as oil slicks. They went around them.

Scatterings of yellowed bones encrusted the edges of the lakes.

“Crocodiles,” Anson said. “The reptiles lived down here once. Perhaps the priests fed them, drawing them here along a secret channel that once linked up with ancient Lake Moeris.”

They circled the lakes.

Did something still live there? What would it be? He pictured saurian eyes, slivered like moons, breaking the surface of the water to watch them, then a crocodile head emerging, and then a body, but not the body of a reptile, but a slab-chested man, streaming water. Half man, half crocodile. Sobek.

They reached another passage that opened up around them into a vestibule and then passed into a vast porticoed hall.

It was a hall that represented the chest cavity of the god. It was also a treasure chest of staggering proportions.

“Dear God of our Fathers!” the Coptic monk Daniel said in a gasp.

“Out of the magic of its gold, heaven was born,” Anson said.

They were looking at the amassed hoard of the Neteru.

Writing on the Road. "Travel creates the momentum I need in my writing." (UPDATE)


Writing fiction is a journey for me
My wife and partner in my travels



As well as our research trips to Egypt for my archaeological fiction series, we are on the road full time these days.
It probably wouldn't work for everyone.
But travel creates a momentum I need and we both enjoy.
What could be more inspiring than writing in the shadows of Uluru (Ayer's Rock)?
If you can write in Australia's outback, you could probably write on the dark side of the moon.
I also continue a journey into the ancient past.

Sunday, August 4, 2013

Who owns ancient Egyptian artefacts? Who owns French impressionist art?


Rameses the Great, British Museum

 

Update 5th April, 2015: the continuing sledge-hammer attacks on an ancient civilization in Iraq adds even greater weight to this issue... Funny how the clamour to repatriate antiquities from museums in the west has quietened down considerably.


Who owns ancient Egypt?
I love the quote by Emory University Museum Curator:  
"People don't go to an impressionist gallery and ask: "Why don't all these paintings go back to Paris?"

Yet over the years we have all heard the clamour for ancient Egyptian treasures and Greek marbles to be repatriated and have heard the arguments about 'natural justice'.

But doesn't world art need to diffuse through the world as much as world ideas?

My archaeological fiction hero Anson Hunter muses in one of his blogs:

"I was haunting the British Museum again and fell to wondering, as I looked around the Egyptian hall of sculptures: if extremists had their way, would they obliterate these remains from the so-called age of ignorance before Islam?


Modern Muslim Egyptians live in fearful tension with their ancient past, it occurred to me, looking up at a colossal head of Rameses.

Not long ago, Egypt's Grand Mufti issued a fatwa against sculpture. Egypt's ancient sculptures are forbidden by Islam, he said. Sculptors are doomed to receive the harshest treatment on Judgement Day.

Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities distanced itself from the fatwa, saying that the sculptures they preserve and showcase are not for the purpose of idolatry but to provide a window on history. "We display statues so they can be studied and so people can get to know their heritage. This is Egypt's national heritage. We don't display them for worship."

A number of influential sheikhs supported the mufti, however, while intellectuals and artists in Egypt were said to have called the fatwa laughable.

And yet...

Could firebrands one day use this as an excuse to harm treasures of history that belong to all of humankind?

The Taliban in central Afghanistan demonstrated the peril of antiquities in the hands of idealogues. They used explosives to destroy the sixth century Buddhas of Bamyan, a pair of colossal standing Buddhas carved into the side of a sandstone cliff, irreplaceable examples of Indo-Greek art.

Antiquities authorities in the Arab Republic of Egypt wonder why Western museums are less than eager to repatriate their Egyptian collections to Egypt, yet who can see what lies ahead for this Islamic nation?In spite of recent hectoring by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities to return artefacts to Egypt from the museums of the world, modern Egypt's exclusive claim on the civilization of the pharaohs is shaky.

Where is the link of this 21st century Arabic society with ancient Egypt? Not religion, not language, not politics, probably not even temperament, certainly not philosophy or social structure - let alone shared basic assumptions about equality between the sexes - not artistic tradition, not even the rhythm of life regulated by the ebb and flow of the Nile... the construction of the Aswan High Dam severed that link forever.

Today's new antiquities grab is as questionable as the first rape of the Nile by colonial powers. It's a form of rampant nationalism and, in more enlightened times, disagreeable in my view.

It's also counter-productive for today's Egypt. The very presence of ancient Egyptian antiquities in the museums of the world spurs thousands to visit Egypt every year.

Why kill the goose that laid the golden sarcophagus?

Feeling a surge of protectiveness for the civilisation I love, I suddenly - unreasonably, perhaps - wish that the British Museum's ancient Egyptian galleries were ten times their present size, along with those of the New York Metropolititan Museum of Art, The Louvre, Berlin Neues Museum and Turin Museum.

And yet I like a great many Egyptians very much and I love the land of Egypt itself and its sites of antiquity and I value the feeling of place that connects me with the past. The Nile Valley is still the biggest and best museum of earth.

The issue of who owns the past is a complicated one...
MEET ANSON HUNTER, FICTION'S RENEGADE ARCHAEOLOGIST IN THE SERIES at AMAZON KINDLE

Ancient Egypt's unseen forces in "The Ibis Apocalypse" - Kindle fiction



Spoken, they were like glyphs graven on the air
"And these glyphs on the Stela of Thoth," she said. "What makes them so potent?"

“Glyphs were never just a writing system," Anson said. "They were divine words. It’s for this reason that the scribes were fearful that certain words could have a malignant power and become uncontrollable forces in the tomb and so they would cut off the head of a lion in a glyph, or truncate a serpent or show spears stuck in the back of a crocodile in order to render it harmless. The hieroglyphs in the Stela of Thoth were the most potent of all. When spoken they were not just sounds, but glyphs graven on the air, real things and entities, image-meanings that took shape and activated a world of unseen forces and alternate reality..."

Discover the Anson Hunter series on Kindle

 

Saturday, August 3, 2013

Archaeology, Global Conspiracies and Intelligence Agency paranoia


Anson Hunter did see their predicament. The Homeland Security people faced a threat from a mysterious and ancient past that for them was almost impossible to comprehend, yet was also impossible to ignore. They must have more evidence than they were prepared to disclose.
Intelligence community people spent their lives seeking out the unknown, he supposed, but they were evidently helpless in the face of the unknowable. This was a realm where conventional intelligence gathering and analysis could no longer help them.
Could he? 
Excerpt from THE SMITING TEXTS,
No 1 in the Anson Hunter fiction series


Fiction for lovers of Egypt, mystery and adventure

Fiction series with Anson Hunter, fiction's renegade archaeologist and expert on ancient Egypt