Barbara Mertz

“.. then we come upon a single sentence, or an isolated phrase, and the mask of ceremonial vanishes to expose the familiar poignancy of man’s quest for immortality, with all its uncertainty and its aching desire. “No one has returned from there to tell us how they fare.”

The lament for a dead child, the demand for justice, the lover’s yearning for his beloved—before our recognition of the universality of human emotion, time and distance shrink, the barriers of language, color, and nationality go down; we look into the mind of a man three millennia dead and call him “brother.”
― Barbara Mertz, Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs: A Popular History of Ancient Egypt