I'm often asked how I came to write a trilogy about ancient Egypt's First Dynasty. Here's an attempt to answer the question, but be warned, it wasn't always pretty.
The Beginnings
As a child, my father would take me to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Our visits would always include walking through their marvelous Egyptian galleries.
As an adult, on my visits to Egypt, I marveled at the Pyramids of Giza, the Step Pyramid of Saqqara, the temple complex in Luxor, and the Valley of the Kings. All these were, of course, fascinating. Yet certain thoughts constantly plagued me. How and when did this Dynastic tradition begin? Who was responsible for uniting what was then a divided Egypt? What conditions prompted such a radical change? The deeper I dived into the literature, the more I was drawn to one character, the mythical King Narmer.
There is scholarly debate about King Narmer. Was he the same person as Menes? Was he one of the Scorpion Kings or simply the offspring of one? Most importantly, was he the one who actually united Upper and Lower Egypt into one nation that prospered for 3,000 years?
Ultimately, as a novelist, I realized that if I were to wait for a definitive answer to those and many other questions I had I would probably need to live at least a couple hundred years. Archaeology takes time.
Diving In
Instead, I visited all the sites in Egypt that had any bearing to that early pre-Dynastic period.
I recruited three ground-breaking Egyptologists to serve as my mentors for the historical background of the novels.
For five years I immersed myself in the history of the period, reading everything I could get my hands on, then pestering my mentors with questions and visiting with them in Egypt, England and Berlin.
Fortunately for me, relatively little is known with certainty about the period, allowing me some latitude in weaving a story that would hold the reader's attention and not come across as a history textbook. Based on my average 4+ star reviews on Amazon, I feel like I was able to create an engaging story, while preserving a semblance of historical accuracy.
As with any work of historical fiction, the author takes liberties. We should also have a sincere commitment to try to be as true to the historical record as possible. We do make mistakes, though; at least I did. In one scene I described a meal that included tomatoes. Egypt today is a major producer of tomatoes in the Arab world, so I erroneously, and without my usual obsessive fact-checking, assumed that was the case 5,000 years ago. Not so! Fortunately, due to the astute eyes of an early reader, I was able to quickly correct that mistake.
The truth is that I did not plan to write a trilogy at all. But the response to The First Pharaoh was strong enough and requests from readers persuasive enough to get me thinking of follow-up stories. I'll save what happened next for next week's newsletter.
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