Remember your first inexplicable tug to Egypt's distant past? What age were you?

When did it begin? As I dig down through the layers of my life to my childhood, like an archaeologist digging through stratigraphic deposits, I discover that the desire to explore ancient Egypt’s mystery appeared to arrive fully formed like the civilization of Egypt itself. Suddenly, at a tender age, I knew that I wanted to find out everything there was to know about this ancient and alluring civilization. An impossible ambition of course, with millennia of Egypt’s secrets still remaining hidden beneath the sands.

What is the powerful magnet of ancient Egypt for today’s world? A popular Egyptologist and book writer once quipped: “It’s all about the gold.” She made a strong point about the popularity of Egyptian exhibitions, and I agree. On a certain level, all that shining bullion certainly is a lure for anyone. And yet... it’s also about a bit more than the gold, as I am sure the Egyptologist would admit. What really compels us, on a deeper, less conscious level, to draw physically close to Tutankhamun’s golden treasures at an exhibition - or to the Great Pyramid at Giza, for that matter? What compels us to journey to be in their presence? It’s more than the preposterous display of ancient power and riches, although that’s a large part of it. It’s a desire for proximity to this magnificent ancient past. Proximity between us now, and Egypt then. These artefacts overwhelm our senses, and yet they also engage us with a deeply personal issue - the ‘first great mystery’ - death. A thrall comes over our senses when we, in our modern age, stand in the presence of the Egyptians’ magnificent obsession with eternity and their monumental rejection of death. I think that is perhaps why I prefer to concentrate on writing my series of modern, archaeological thrillers that explore this frisson of modern characters brushing against the ancient past, rather than setting my fiction purely in the past. We want to feel ourselves in that ancient presence. I am aware of Egypt’s gifts. The ancient Greeks and Romans acknowledged them too. Egypt gave us the first nation state, the twenty-four hours of the day, the 365 days of the year, the first great buildings in stone, architecture, astronomy, medicine, paper, writing, even the invention of fictional dramatic stories recorded in writing… Then there is religion. Take away Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dream Coat, Moses and The Ten Commandments, The Exodus, the life-saving flight of baby Jesus with the holy family to Egypt, as well as every biblical reference to Egypt, and the Bible becomes a novella. Ancient Egypt also gave us the ultimate symbolic landscape for dreaming. A sense of eternity made captive in art and stone. And yet I am not unaware of the dark side of ancient Egypt. Workers may not have been 'slaves' in name and they may have been fed by the state and their injuries patched up by medicos, but coercion was at the core of Egyptian monumentality. New research in The Journal of Egyptian Architecture challenges the romantic view of ancient Egypt. ('The Dark Side of a Model Community: The ‘Ghetto’ of el-Lahun'.) It is a trend today to suggest that the pyramid builders were willing workers, perhaps as a reaction against the whip and taskmaster scenes of early biblical epic movies like The Ten Commandments. Yet the most casual glance at Egypt's monumental architecture tells us that ancient Egypt was no picnic for workers - whether they were prisoners, or Egyptians forced into state labour under the draconian corvee conscription system. Running away was a capital crime. Shirk and you could have your nose and ears cut off. I refer to this dark, coercive side of ancient Egypt in The Smiting Texts where a character tells my alternative Egyptologist hero Anson Hunter: "Dynastic Ancient Egypt was not a land of allure, as you like to imagine; it was the most draconian civilization the world has ever known. Why can you not see it? The truth is there in the museum cases of the world, captured in the Egyptian paintings and carvings in wood or stone or on plaster of ordinary folk, the servant girl, the baker, the boatman, the seated scribe. The expression in their eyes, wide in their whites, is fear. They lived and died in terror. But if God punished this civilization as it was told in the Book of Exodus, why do you think you would have loved it? ‘Look at the carved Egyptian eye of Isis on the wall of a temple. Look at this eye of this goddess. You think it is a symbol of mystery, the single, feminine Egyptian eye in profile. Quintessential. But this black orb is not a symbol of allure; it is more like a dead planet in a pitiless universe. The oasis civilization of pharaonic Egypt was a hell where the sun beat down like a swordsmith’s hammer and reeds conspired in whispers at the edge of a river of tears. The land was hemmed in by deserts like the sides of a coffin and by a police, judicial, fiscal, priestly and bureaucratic system that arrested freedom like an image in diorite, the hardest of stone, which the carvers in the workshops shaped not with ease, as it seemed from their sublime achievements, but with the sacrifice of lifetimes. There is a reason why a people still celebrates their hasty exodus from this place with unleavened bread and bitter herbs 2000 years on. The Nazis of the twentieth century killed the Jews; the Ancient Egyptians ground their souls to stone dust…" Consider the construction of the Great Pyramid - horror heaped upon stone horror... As fictional Egyptologist Anson Hunter describes a visit: “On a good day, the Great Pyramid is a morbid wonder... today, it’s suffocating. Both inside and out. I don’t need to be toiling up the claustrophobic lengths of its corridors and galleries, with walls that seem to be sweating under the crushing weight of stone above, to feel it. Just standing in front of the myriad layers of blocks - horror heaped upon stone horror - hazing upwards to the heavens, is enough. The scale of its disregard for human misery is breathtaking in itself. Nothing had ever been found inside the Great Pyramid - The Last Great Wonder of the ancient world - except for a couple of fragments. And yet Sir Isaac Newton believed that the Great Pyramid held the key to the Apocalypse. What is the magic of Egypt? Is it magic itself? “The Talmud states: ‘Ten measures of Magic (keshafim) were given to the world; Egypt received nine while the rest of the world received one.”. What are we to make of the magic that permeates this enigmatic civilization?