Awful! Absolutely awful. A real slog. Every day was a battle, trying to finish this piece of shit before the end of the year.

This book, for starters, is not a book in any real sense of the word. These are notes: The kind of notes one takes before, perhaps, getting started on the book-writing process. There are technically chapters and sections in this book, but they seem randomly placed. One thought leads to another with no coherence. I would not be surprised if these started as lecture notes.

Oh, and the prose is so so soooo boring. It is aggressively and actively dull, like those beige rooms they put mentally ill people in. And bad! According to the back cover, Dr. Tyldesley has written several award-winning books. How?! How in the world is this possible? Easy, it's because she's an Egyptologist.

Long, long ago I wanted to be an Egyptologist. So much so that I picked universities based on this criterion. There are very few universites with Egyptology departments, and the one I went to had one of the most prestigious ones. And I could immediately tell it was a deeply sick department, just waiting to die, with professors actively discouraging students from getting into this field, bless them. In fact, my graduating class only had two Egyptologist! And that describes the entire discipline pretty well: as dry and lifeless as Tutankhamun.

Egyptology is one of those weird subjects that really shouldn't exist anymore, like the Classics. It's as if, in addition to all of the modern science departments we had Alchemy and Astrology departments too. We should've dismembered Egyptology long ago, like Set did to Osiris, and scattered the pieces to the four corners of the world. Because Egyptology is, at this point, little more than the crusty refusal to acknowledge three modern scientific disciplines: History, linguistics, and archaeology.

It is only this refusal to enter the late-19th-century that allows an Egyptologist like Dr. Tyldesley to say something like "Egypt had no decorative art." What?! You're describing 3000 years of history over a very large territory. How could you possibly make such a statement? The correct statement, I imagine, is "We have no evidence of Egyptian decorative art, but, unless these people were fucking aliens, yes, over 3000 years of history and thousands of kilometers of the Nile, they probably did make decorative art of some kind or another." Equally stupid generalities about women, about law, and so on are littered throughout the book. Three-thousand years of history!

The Egyptian Gods are a mess. There's about a million of them, each has five names, twenty depictions, and each town had their own myths about them. To me, if you agree to write a book about the Egyptian Gods, untangling that mess is part of your job (I'm assuming Joyce agreed to write this book and wasn't forced at gunpoint, but perhaps that's unjustified). She somehow makes it more complicated, surprise surprise, but also, she blames the Egyptians for it! The Egyptians, she says, weren't like us (correct). They had a totally different relationship to reality and logic, you see. This is nonsense. Western writers love this kind of nonsense. They can't make sense of other cultures' myths, so clearly they had a different relationship to reality. They suck at translating so they translate it as gobbledigook as claim it's "Eastern mysticism." Look, if I went to an Egyptian merchant, I can damn well guarantee that his version of reality and mine would very much agree. He would count how many bushels of barley I had taken and he would insist on his five deneb of copper as payment. The Egyptians were humans and they were not stupid.

Then there's the lingustic part of it; this one hurts the most, I think. To anyone who actually loves languages, it is obvious that we still don't understand the Ancient Egyptian language fully, and never will. That's the grim, meat-hook reality. I imagine much that we translate literally may have been metaphors, inside jokes, contemporary references, which are simply lost. That is why so many of these stories are so bizarre, the titles of the Gods so strange. So we get weird "Egyptologisms" like "She-Who-Devours-The-Hearts-While-Becoming." No one has ever talked like this, and we probably just don't understand the language. That "While-Becoming" bit is, I don't know, some kind of aspect marker? Something like that?

I'm bored just writing this stupid review. Let me just finish on two positive notes that have nothing at all to do with Joyce. The Egyptians themselves, when they're allowed to shine through, are some of the craziest and weirdest bastards around. The "Tale of Sinuhe" is the most human of them all. "The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor" is one of the all-time shaggy dog stories, with a hilariously deadpan punchline. "The Eloquent Peasant" is also hilarious, featuring a peasant whose complaints are so good that the judge can't bear to solve his problem, since he enjoys listening to him so much. Then there's "The Tale of Two Brothers," which is grim and violent and oddly scary. Ah, it hurts to think of all the amazing stories we've lost. And then there's all the creation myths. I'll let you in on a little secret: There is a lot of masturbation, hand-jobs, force-feeding semen, incest, cutting people's dicks off, and so on. It's all pretty weird and strange, but that's the kind of thing I was after.

And then there's the black sheep, Herodotus. Historians love hating on Herodotus. "He's not reliable!" or "He's not a real historian!" Whatever. My boy Herodotus has two things going for him. For one, he actually did talk to ancient Egyptians (late dynastic ones, but whatever), so, you know, that's probably worth something. Secondly, he could write! Even translated, his stories are interesting and fun. Whenever Joyce would put in an excerpt from Herodotus, you remembered for a brief second what good writing was like, only to immediately be lectured by Joyce about how we shouldn't trust Herodotus. Jealousy! Ressentiment! Egyptologist, shitty writers as we've seen, have actually used the fact that he's such an engaging writer against him, claiming that this shows he wrote to entertain people!

Entertain people while writing history! How dare he!

Rating: 5 severed penises