Book review: "To Live Forever"

“To Live Forever - Egyptian Treasures From the Brooklyn Museum” is a companion book by Edward Bleiberg, Curator at Brooklyn Museum for the ongoing traveling exhibition.

Books about funeral religion and practices are abundant, but few can satisfy the need of readers with Egyptomania syndrome. Some are outdated (especially considering the rapid advancement in Egyptology today) and some take too much emphasis on the modern eye’s fascination of ancient civilization and tend to suffer from lack of enough new information. A few stand out with encyclopedic illustrations of royal funerals and tombs, but leave funeral practices of middle class and lower rank people to reader’s own imagination.

To Live Forever addresses these insufficiency of past publication with the aid of world-class collection from the Brooklyn Museum. The book starts with a brief chapter about the history of ancient Egypt, which serves both as a cap for readers with some background and introduction for first time readers. Then it address the topic in four chapters: funeral belief, mummification, funeral and tombs. Each is elaborated with two different threads: the horizontal thread follows the changes through different periods and dynasties, the other one goes vertically and examines the difference between different social classes (royalty, high officials, middle class, and ordinary people). There is also an underlining curatorial perspective throughout the book which is also fascinating because the author also compares the different scholarly opinions about the topic (from Herodotus to the up-to-date) thus giving the readers a sense of growth, change and controversies in Egyptology.