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"Dead Egyptians"

8/19/2024

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​​        My fellow bibliophiles, you know how it is. You read lots of books: good books, great books, not-so-great books, books you like, books you love, books that make you go “meh,” books so boring, bad, or otherwise unengaging you just can’t go the distance with them.
        But then once in a while you come across a book that seizes your imagination and,
as Emily Dickenson would put it, sends you off on a frigate that takes you lands away; a book that you lose and forget yourself in the first time you open it and every time you come back to it, so that when you look up from it you blink, snap back to reality and think, “dang, this is good!”
       I recently read just such a book, Del Blackwater's’ historical novel “Dead Egyptians.”
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​          Exceptionally well-written and evoking in style Norman Mailer’s “Ancient Evenings” (which happens to be one of my favorite books, so mayhaps I’m biased),
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...but less labyrinthine than Mailer's book (and I mean that in a good way), “Dead Egyptians” transports the reader and immerses us in Egypt, a land full of magic and the ghosts of an ancient civilization, at a time when British imperialism laid claim to the land, its people, and its archeological treasures.
      The multi-layered story is set in Cairo at the turn of the twentieth century. A young British linguist named Albion Stanley, who, haunted by a vision he saw as a child while visiting an archeological dig in Egypt with his father, returns to Cairo where he finds a job as a translator of ancient scrolls at the British Office of Antiquities while he searches for he knows not what. Pulled into the opulent, decadent world of the English upper class in Cairo, Albion meets a young libertine named Aleister Crowley who introduces him to opium houses, illicit sexuality, and the dangerous – yet, for Albion, illuminating - world of the occult, or beliefs centered on supernatural, mystical, or magical  phenomena.  As one character in the book observes, “The occult is as inseparable from Egypt as the sand and the pyramids. One comes with the other here.”  
       One of the central characters to the story is the historical figure Imhotep, deified priest, physician and architect of the Saqqara pyramid.
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      Imhotep, destined to immortality, yearns always for his love, while the object of his love is destined to die and become reincarnated but with no memory of past life or love. Imhotep's lover will rediscover and fall in love with Imhotep over and over again but will die, forget, be reborn, rediscover. But until that rediscovery happens Imhotep must wait, yearn, and live with memories from the past that won't exist for his beloved.
      The book also deals with thorny issues of archeology, especially the problem of ancient artifacts being removed from the countries to which they belong and taken into possession by other countries. 
     In the colonial times of the nineteenth and  twentieth centuries countless priceless objects were taken from Egypt and acquired by European museums, most by the British Museum.  But over and above the injustice at play, there was the destructive ignorance of the fact that some artifacts, especially ancient scrolls, that would survive indefinitely in the dry Egyptian heat will disintegrate in the humid climate of more northern countries. 
       Many of the characters in the book are figures from Egyptian history and mythology and others are British and European historical figures, among them early twentieth century  archeologists, Egyptologists, and the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, pictured below at around the age he would have been in the book.  
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        Blackwater has included a helpful glossary of terms at the end of the book, as well as a guide to the hieroglyphics used throughout the story.
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         Anyone with a love of ancient Egyptian lore will love this book. And if one didn’t have a love of ancient Egyptian lore before reading  “Dead Egyptians,” this page-turner may well serve as the spark. 
          "Dead Egyptians" is available on Amazon. Here's the link:

https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Egyptians-Del-Blackwater-ebook/dp/B0D4NFDGQ6/ref=sr_1_1?crid=37Q4YDHZJPFV1&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.TSQjgBwnHDH-wZmeAVefKQ.P0inWlOibtMT5Tk3eNPXCWBYFOLJC7lavyKJYuERwXc&dib_tag=se&keywords=dead+egyptians+del+blackwater&qid=1724108366&sprefix=%2Caps%2C323&sr=8-1​
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