Tales of the Dead: Ancient Egypt

DK bring us another variation on the blurring of fact and fiction. Ancient Egypt combines double page spreads and ‘cut-away’ illustrations about building the pyramids and mummification with a cartoon story about tomb robbing that runs around the edges of the pages. There’s a lot that’s awkward about the result. The pages are crowded. The detail in the illustrations is frequently too small (at least for my aged eyes). I am not quite sure how the roof goes back in some of the cut-aways. The cartoon story reads top to bottom on the left-hand page and usually, but not always, bottom to top on the right. Nor is it an exciting story. However, there is a lot of well organised textual and pictorial information, some of which I don’t remember from other titles on this subject, and the content of the cartoon story is cleverly linked with the factual information on the same page. The book is perhaps most suited as a browser and the story may encourage children to read through the book, taking in some of the other information on the way, and get a broader picture of Ancient Egypt than they might from merely hunting down specific facts. The index is fuller than in some DK titles. There doesn’t seem to be any reason for the inclusion of half a dozen cartoon ‘out-takes’ on the index page, other than to fill up vacant space.