El–Daly, O. 2005. Egyptology. The missing millennium. – London, UCL Press

Abstract

The subject of this book is medieval Arabic writings about ancient Egypt. The author states in the introduction that Egyptology is too much Western oriented and that the early Arabic writings and research about ancient Egypt are largely ignored and dismissed as fairytales by Egyptologists. During the Middle Ages a large number of texts about ancient Egypt were written. The author used material from more than one hundred different sources for the book; sources mostly unknown to Egyptologists and thus little used by them. An exception is Kuhlmann (1983), who uses the descriptions of several Arabic travellers to reconstruct the now destroyed temple of Akhmim. But with el–Daly’s book a large corpus of little known and less accessible material becomes accessible to Egyptologists. Read more...