A Practical Look at the Revised Edition
I picked up the revised edition a few years back after the older print kept showing up in used bookstores with yellowed pages and water damage. The new version has better image reproduction, especially the color plates. That alone makes it worth the cover price if you are doing serious reference work. The book itself is straightforward. It covers the major periods from predynastic through Ptolemaic, with sections on temple reliefs, tomb paintings, sculpture, and crafts. What actually matters in practice is how the images are laid out. Most editions of this kind just paste photos next to paragraphs. This one groups comparative plates so you can see stylistic changes side by side. That is useful when you are trying to date something that falls between periods. I ran into a problem when I was cross-referencing a limestone fragment with a cat figurine type. The revised edition's plate numbering did not match the old index I had from my first copy. I spent about twenty minutes figuring out that the new edition reorganized the appendix. The workaround was simple: I ignored the old index entirely and used the new plate list with the chronological section headers instead. Took five minutes once I realized the structure had shifted.
The writing style is academic but not dense. You do not need a background in Egyptology to follow it. The terminology is standard—cartouche, faience, relief modeling—and it assumes you already know what those mean or is willing to look them up. If you are completely new to the subject, you might want a glossary nearby. The book does not include one in the revised edition, which is a minor oversight. One thing beginners often miss: the section on color in Egyptian art is more important than most people give it credit for. The original pigments were bright—lapis, malachite, real gold leaf in royal contexts—and the reproductions in this edition do a reasonable job showing that. A lot of popular books make everything look sandy and beige because the photos are old or the printing is poor. This edition keeps the color fidelity high enough that you can actually use it for palette analysis if you are into that kind of thing. The only real weakness is the coverage of non-royal art. If you are looking for detailed treatment of Middle Kingdom coffin texts or New Kingdom domestic scenes, you will need to supplement this with other sources. The revised edition handles royal and temple material well but skips a lot of the everyday stuff. That is not a dealbreaker unless that is your specific focus.
At around $40 to $50 depending on where you buy it, it is priced fairly for a hardcover with full-color plates. Used copies of the first edition sometimes show up cheaper, but the image quality difference is noticeable enough that I would not bother hunting for those unless you are on a tight budget.
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