After identifying a pyramid, a hieroglyph and checking the name of Tutankhamun, most of us have exhausted the sum total of our knowledge of Ancient Egypt. It is more remote in time than ancient Greece and Rome, but somehow feels more remote culturally, too. Perhaps this is because to an untrained eye those hieroglyphs are identifiable as something—humans, animals, representations of plants and things—and the pyramids are identifiable as burial sites, and yet knowing the function of these phenomena merely enhances the apparent weirdness and incomprehensibility of the culture that produced them.

We have three interviews to enhance your understanding of Ancient Egypt. Toby Wilkinson of Clare College, Cambridge talks about his best books on Ancient Egypt. He recommends a range of books from A Cultural Atlas of Ancient Egypt­, the first book he bought on Egypt, to the most scholarly reassessments of Ancient Egypt and Akhenaten, Tutankhamun's much less famous father, the ‘heretic king’ who introduced monotheism into Ancient Egypt and overthrew centuries of tradition. Elizabeth Frood, lecturer in Egyptology at Oxford, recommends books on, among other things, Ancient Egyptian literature and life in an Ancient Egyptian village—recovered from written evidence that was preserved on scraps of pottery thrown into a non-functioning well that was turned into a rubbish tip.

Finally, Diane Greco Josefowicz looks at French Egyptomania, at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, when Napoleon failed to fulfil his ambitions to emulate Alexander the Great’s conquests, but did much to advance the science of Egyptology and the understanding of Ancient Egypt. She discusses the broader cultural roots of French Egyptomania in the first half of the 19th century.