Tales of Ancient Egypt, by Roger Lancelyn Green (Puffin Books, 2004)
King Arthur was my introduction to Roger Lancelyn Green's books, and this inspired me to find more by the same author. Tales of Ancient Egypt did not disappoint. Egyptian gods, goddesses, stories, geography and history are rather muddled in my head, and this book is a great help in beginning to sort them all out. Like Green's Arthur stories, the tales are simultaneously appropriate and enjoyable for children and adults.
Two stories particularly interested me. One is the Egyptian take on the story of Helen of Troy. (Hint: The real Helen remained safely hidden in Egypt until Menelaus could reclaim her; it was a sort of spirt double that went to Troy with Paris and inspired all the Greek-Trojan bloodletting.)
The fascination of the second, entitled Se-Osiris and the Sealed Letter, lies in what it did to my understanding of the Biblical story of the Exodus. In The Sealed Letter, Egyptian magicians boast of their prowess with claims such as, "I could bring a great darkness over the land of Egypt that would last for three days," and "I...could bring a blight upon Egypt that would destroy its crops for one season." The Exodus story of Moses and the plagues always seemed unsatisfactory to me, first in the very strangeness of God using plagues of blood, locusts, darkness, etc. to motivate Pharaoh, and second that the Egyptian magicians would counter Moses's plagues with plagues of their own, rather than the much more logical (and useful) removal of the effects the plagues.
What this Egyptian tale shows me, however, is that God was speaking to the ancient Egyptians within the context of their own culture, in a language they understood.
