Das Krokodil und der Pharao: Eine Anthologie altägyptischer Literatur

by Constanze Holler (Editor)

Ancient Egypt had a wonderful and sophisticated literature, which dealt with all areas of life. Love stories and biographies, fairy tales and reports of campaigns create a new image of a strange but fascinating world. In this book Constanze Holler gathered the most beautiful and surprising stories from the land of pyramids and pharaohs. It is a literary journey through time, back to the beginnings of literature.

118 pages, Hardcover

First published September 26, 2012

Reviews

[Ptellomey · Rating 3 out of 5]

The collection presents literary texts from the ancient Egypt, from the earliest times to the coptic era. Most (all) of these texts you will encounter during undergrad studies in Egyptology.
Sadly as the collection isn't giving you any help letting you understand the texts as there is no commentary, which would be needed for anyone not having studied Egyptology or at least Middle Egyptian to a certain degree. So the general reader will most likely get nothing out of these text at all.
But for me at least it was a nice remembrance back to Uni and to discussing these texts in lectures.

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'd like to give this book a higher rating, but I had some issues with it.

Some of the stories were a little difficult to read; there were a number of sentences that I read many times trying to figure out what was meant. The structure of some of the sentences was unusual to say the least. While I'm sure that at least some of that was present in the original texts, I'm wondering if some came from the translators themselves. (It would appear that the many translators are German and if they originally translated from Ancient Egyptian to German and then German to English that could explain some oddities).

Another issue is most likely the fault of the publisher. This book has a retail price of $34.95. For 94 pages, 69 of which are the translated texts; the rest are a preface, a bibliography (mostly in German), a note on the texts used, biographies of the translators, a glossary, and yes, they even counted the endpapers which are of course totally blank. I just checked and most of the stories are available online for free in the original Egyptian and in English. I realize that printing and publishing are expensive and this is something of a niche title, but although I bought this book at a discount I still paid far too much for what is here.
The glossary is pretty basic (wouldn't most people picking up a book titled "The Anthology of Ancient Egyptian Texts" already be familiar with Isis and Osiris and the title "King of Upper and Lower Egypt", etc?), although it can be useful for place names outside of Egypt. The bibliography, as previously mentioned, is mostly German-language material and thus not likely to be of much use to most of the readers of this English-language book. There are no illustrations or photos of any kind, nor are the translated texts accompanied by the untranslated originals which is unfortunate for anyone who wanted to practice transliterating and translating hieroglyphs or hieratic.
While the price tag suggests a premium product, the end result feels pretty bare-bones.
Honestly, just skip this and read the stories online for free.

[Oh My Bookness · Rating 2 out of 5]

All I have to say it is not what I expected and it was a slow and boring read. I do love reading all thing on Egyptian culture and history but this was slow and not very informative. So there were things in there that was already known and did not explain what it had to do with the story.