Ancient Lives: The Story of the Pharaohs’ Tombmakers

More than three thousand years ago a village was established at Thebes on the west bank of the Nile to house the workers who created the tombs of the Pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings.

Through patient excavation and a study of ancient records, John Romer has recreated, for the first time, the lives of these extraordinary men in vivid detail. Stonemasons, painters, sculptors, scribes, lived with their wives and children and worked in this remote and sacred place. Romer tells of their quarrels and rivalries, sickness and health, marriages and deaths, and the effects of floods, pillage and war. We feel their hunger when rations are scarce and celebrate with them in times of plenty. But most of all we join them as they create some of the greatest masterworks of ancient art: the elaborately carved and decorated tombs of the Pharaohs.

John Romer is the author of two successful books about Egypt: The Valley of the Kings, a popular history of the valley, and Romer’s Egypt, which accompanied his BBC TV series. In this his latest book, and in the television series based on the book and shown on Channel 4, he triumphantly succeeds in bringing to life this vanished community of tombmakers.