The Mummy Makers of Egypt

A gorgeously illustrated story about a family of Egyptian embalmers that will enthrall kids with its mummy-making details and brilliantly painted pages.

From artist and Egypt specialist Tamara Bower comes her third, gorgeous book about Ancient Egypt. Using the classic style of Egyptian art, the book is painstakingly accurate in facts and illustrative style. Artifacts, funerary customs, kid-loving gory details of the mummification process, hieroglyphs, and details of life in ancient Egypt are told through the eyes of Ipy, whose father is embalmer to the King. Yuya, father of the Queen, has died and Ipy must help his father in the mummification process. Yuya is an actual mummy and the discovery of his tomb is an entertaining story in itself, with the archaeologist Theodore Davis fainting at the sight of so much gold, and the portly Gaston Maspero getting stuck while trying to climb into the tomb. Yuya's tomb was a spectacular discovery in the Valley of the Kings that was later overshadowed only by the discovery of King Tut, Yuya's great-grandson.

The book features sidebars of hieroglyphs and their meanings, a map, and an afterword telling more about the life of Yuya, of the burial process, and ancient Egypt in general. While there are a number of children's books on mummies, none are told from the point of view of the embalmers themselves, and none are illustrated with the meticulous eye of Tamara Bower.

TAMARA BOWER has been fascinated by ancient Egypt since she was a child and dressed up to play as ancient Egyptians with her friends. She studied fine art in college, and was trained in archaeological illustration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she worked as a staff illustrator in the Department of Egyptian Art. She has worked as the technical illustrator for archaeological digs in Egypt, Turkey, Spain, Belize, and California. She is the author of two other children's books about ancient Egypt:How the Amazon Queen Fought the Prince of Egypt (2005) —which won the ALA Amelia Bloomer Award for Nonfiction Picture Books, the Blue Ribbon Nonfiction Book Award, and the Africana Book Award for Young Children—andThe Shipwrecked Sailor (2000). Tamara lives in New York City.