Book Alert / Tutankhamun's Armies

Tutankhamun's Armies -- Battle and Conquest During Ancient Egypt's Late 18th Dynasty by John Coleman Darnell and Colleen Manassa, Wiley '07, $25.95, 286 pages, ISBN #0471743585. Index, further reading, source notes, b&w images  sprinkled through text.

A book by a couple of Yale Egyptologists about the Amarna period of the New Kingdom (1550--1335 B.C.E.) figures to be a yawner. So it is welcome to find prose like the following (even if it is a bit over the top):

"The furious thunder of thousands of hooves, the clatter and sheen of bronze armor sparkling in the desert sun, the crunch of wooden wheels racing across a rock-strewn battlefield -- and leading this terrifying chariot charge, the gallant Pharaoh, the ribbons of his blue war crown streaming behind him as he launches yet another arrow into the panicking mass of his soon-to-be-routed enemies."

We've come to know a good deal about Egypt's "boy king," King Tut, through discovery of his tomb in the last century. But less well known is his father, the "heretic king" Akhenaten, equally a subject of this engaging history. The authors' aim is to put the reader into the action, as the nature of warfare evolved because of the invention of the chariot and the composite bow, developments that also transformed military strategy and tactics.

John Darnell and Colleen Manassa, who teach in Yale's Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, also profile Egypt's enemies, including the Hittite Empire, which thrived where Turkey is today, and the city-states of Palestine and Syria. Also portrayed is the subject state of Nubia, home of Egypt's gold.