Life on the Nile - Paperback (English Edition)

This story began with an unexpected phone call from Porto in Portugal. Isabel, a dear friend with whom we had not communicated for a long time, called to invite us to participate in a voyage on the Nile in the spring of 2022. For many years, we had wanted to visit Egypt, travel the Nile, and visit its many temples, monuments, and pyramids, which the pharaohs chose to make their eternal abode millennia ago. After our trip was postponed repeatedly for various reasons, we had abandoned the idea and dismissed it as impossible.

Having been locked away out of fear of COVID for an entire year at this point, Isabel's proposal seemed completely crazy to us at first. However, gradually, it took hold of our wills, and a few hours later, we decided to face the challenge of traveling to the Middle East in the middle of COVID. “Yes, we are going!” we said.

The sixteen chapters of this story seek to capture the different stages, processes, and experiences we had during the trip, the great new friends with whom we shared them and how this journey has helped us to enjoy and obtain a complete vision of an extraordinary period in the story of humanity.

Additionally, we tried to identify patterns of behavior that seem to be repeated over and over again throughout history in other locations and under different circumstances, giving shape to Paul Kriwaczek's approach in Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization: “It sometimes seems as if the whole ancient story served as a dry-run, a dress rehearsal, for the succeeding civilization.”