EXPLORING EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY

A fresh edition of the author’s ever-useful overview of Egyptian myth and legend, rearranged and featuring some new content.

From the “dynamic duo” of Khnum and Amun-Ra to the giant snake Apep and the “dual-gendered fertility god” Hapi, crowds of deities and “creepy monsters” parade through Nardo’s analytical summaries. His insistence in the rewritten introduction and elsewhere that the ancient Egyptians saw the gods and their deeds as historical seems at odds with mentions elsewhere of “symbolic” representations in art and conflicting variations in local creation myths and pantheons. Still, readers able to weather his short discourses on cosmogonies and zoomorphs will enjoy the relish with which he recounts, for instance, how evil Seth chopped brother Osiris into “bloody morsels,” the awful vengeance cow-headed Hathor wrought on the “mere humans” who “disrespected” her father Ra, and how she rescued blinded Horus after Seth was able to “get the drop on him.” The image chosen to portray the tale of Seth and Osiris unfortunately features Seth as a brutish, black-skinned man and evokes racist caricatures; other images show ancient artifacts and sites. In this edition, a chapter on Egyptian myths in modern culture has been switched out for one that’s less likely to go stale, thrillingly titled “Serpents, Soul Eaters, and Other Monsters,” and the resource lists at the end have been updated as well.

Serviceable both for introducing the topic and for replacing a lost or worn copy of an earlier version.