A personal history and guide to the ritual site of Abydos, on the West bank of the Nile, which flourished from the Predynastic period until Christian times (c. 4000 BC to AD 641). The author moved to Egypt in 1933 and was involved in excavations with a number of Egyptian archaeologists.

The story of one woman's search for the previous life she led in ancient Egypt, written by a Rolling Stone and New Yorker journalist.

Revelations in Egyptology, based on the diaries of Dorothy Eady, better known as Omm Sety. Omm Sety, a brilliant, adventuring Englishwoman, worked under some of the greatest Egyptologists of the 20th century and "saw" into the past. Hers is a story of ancient love - of gods, pyramids, pharaohs and queens, and treasures that wait beneath the sand. In Omm Sety's Egypt, the authors present never-before-seen episodes from her truly incredible life, including important revelations about Egypt's lost history. Hanny el Zeini was her close friend during the many years she lived in the ancient holy city of Abydos. It was a friendship filled with star-lit evenings among the ruins of ancient temples, speaking of the mysteries of this land they both loved. Dr. el Zeini was her trusted confidant to whom she revealed her secret other life in 19th Dynasty Egypt. Shortly before her death in 1981, she gave him her diaries, which chronicled her life in two worlds. Drawing on Omm Sety's diaries and on hundreds of hours of recorded conversations and Dr. el Zeini's own writings, co-author Catherine Dees brings this extraordinary material together into a story that asks the reader to suspend disbelief and enter into the mystery that was Omm Sety.

A special connection with ancient Egypt drew Omm Sety to Egypt, where she studied with the great Egyptologists Selim Hassan and Ahmed Fakhry. For more than four decades she made her home in the shadow of the Great Pyramid of Giza and in the mudbrick village surrounding the Temple of Sety I at Abydos. For her, there was no separation between ancient and modern Egypt. Pictures on tomb walls illustrated the games children played in the streets in front of her house. The texts she translated from the temple walls shed light on the origins of the social customs of her Egyptian neighbors. For another four decades this book, which deserves to be called Omm Sety's life work, remained hidden away. Now Nicole B. Hansen, an Egyptologist who specializes in connections between ancient and modern Egypt, brings this work to light in an annotated edition with extensive notes and bibliography, illustrated with Omm Sety's own drawings. It features a foreword by Kent R. Weeks, who rediscovered KV5 in the Valley of the Kings, and an introduction by Walter A. Fairservis, the late director of the Hierakonpolis Project. For Egyptologists, this book includes explanations of texts from the Pyramid Texts to Herodotus as well as ancient Egyptian art. For anthropologists, it represents the results of a lifetime of unbridled participant-observation, during which Omm Sety used folk treatments to cure her ills and agreed to serve as a medium for a spirit during a magic ritual. For those interested in Omm Sety herself, this book provides new insights into her life, the people she knew and the places she lived.

From Herodotus's day to the present political upheavals, the steady flow of the Nile has been Egypt's heartbeat. It has shaped its geography, controlled its economy and moulded its civilisation. The same stretch of water which conveyed Pharaonic battleships, Ptolemaic grain ships, Roman troop-carriers and Victorian steamers today carries modern-day tourists past bankside settlements in which rural life – fishing, farming, flooding – continues much as it has for millennia. At this most critical juncture in the country's history, foremost Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson takes us on a journey up the Nile, north from Lake Victoria, from Cataract to Cataract, past the Aswan Dam, to the delta. The country is a palimpsest, every age has left its trace: as we pass the Nilometer on the island of Elephantine which since the days of the Pharaohs has measured the height of Nile floodwaters to predict the following season's agricultural yield and set the parameters for the entire Egyptian economy, the wonders of Giza which bear the scars of assault by nineteenth-century archaeologists and the modern-day unbridled urban expansion of Cairo – and in Egypt's earliest art (prehistoric images of fish-traps carved into cliffs) and the Arab Spring (fought on the bridges of Cairo) – the Nile is our guide to understanding the past and present of this unique, chaotic, vital, conservative yet rapidly changing land.