We have known about (or thought we have know about) "The Ancient Egyptians" since childhood; rather more exciting and romantic than "The Ancient Britons", but just as shadowy. We think of them perhaps as occupying a rather short, though remote, period in the perspective of antiquity, forgetting or ignoring if we do so that ancient Egypt had prehistoric beginning at least six thousand years ago, and that the Egyptian state, as a Great Power of the ancient world, existed as a continuous documented entity for some two thousand five hundred years until its conquest by Persia, the native dynastic line not becoming extinct until a couple of centuries later. 

 Within such an enormous  time-span - it is as though we ourselves had a continuous civilized culture and dynastic tradition stretching back from today to the Early Iron Age - it is naturally proper to look at ancient Egypt in individual phrases. In this book the first formative centuries of early Egyptian civilization are discussed and illustrated, the foundation upon which in subsequent periods the vast enduring structure of the Egyptian state was built, and once built, maintained. In fact, the genesis and rise of of the earlier phrases of Egyptian art, here demonstrated, are not only the necessary prelude to what followed, but had a vivid and arresting interest both in themselves, and in the wider world of ancient art as a whole.