Kremena Spengler

This is the third poorly written books for young children on the subject of hieroglyphs that I've reviewed recently. It's a sad state of affairs --- the books are cheaply produced in full and quite good color in China, but they are written by people who don't know anything about the subject. 50 years ago the problems were different; color was too expensive, but the writers took the trouble to learn about, or, like Isaac Asimov, already knew about their subject.

Besides the color photographs, show more which show how large and how deeply carved the hieroglyphs could be in the walls of some temples, and the colorful artistry used in some hieroglyph paintings, the book has little to recommend it, other than a font similar to the "Raiders of the Lost Ark" font for the titles.

What are its defects? The book starts out with a misuse of the word "letter". I think the author believes that a letter must not be also a picture, but why is that? Even our letter "A" is derived from an ancient word for "ox". "aleph", and it looks vaguely like an ox-head, with horns, but upside-down now, for ease of drawing. The description of the Rosetta stone is confused --- the middle part was not written in a newer form of Egyptian, but in a less pictorial writing system derived from the hieroglyphic one called demotic. It refers the reader to facthound.com which went offline in 2021. It mistranslates the word "hieroglyph" as "language of the gods", a better translation is "sacred carving". This is particularly cruel since it impairs the growing child's intuition about other words that might have "hier" or "glyph" in them, as "hierarchy" or "petroglyph" impairing their language acquisition and making the English language seem incoherent. At 24 pages, it is shorter than some of the other books, so there is less room to make outright false statements; I guess it could be worse. show less

A timeline of inventions from fire to the iPad illustrated with cartoons. At the end is an invitation to build your own timeline, a glossary, and bibliography with books and internet sites. Approximately grades 2-3.