Our book today is a big fat thing called Akhenaten: King of Egypt by Cyril Aldred (when reading pretty much any history on pretty much any subject, you should, if possible, hold out for a historian named Cyril Aldred), and in addition to being a fantastic soup-to-nuts historical and archaeological account of ancient Egypt’s infamous heretic pharaoh, the book is also a stark illustration of the dangers of the Brattle Bookshop’s wonderful sale lot and its abundance of $1, $3, and $5 books. As long-time Stevereads readers will know, I haunt the bargain-book lot of the Brattle (where, ahem-hem, kindly strangers can call in gift certificates in any amount for their hard-working book-blogger), and on my less-controlled days, I sometimes hoover up goodies with less balance and discretion than I exercise in, say, picking out new clothes.

Akhenaten is a perfect case-in-point. The Brattle buys book collections far and wide, and quite often those collections end up more or less intact on the bargain carts, so you can see that so-and-so built up a substantial collection of Napoleonic sailing lore, or hardcover mystery novels, or, in this recent case, ancient Egypt: book after book after book on ancient Egypt – big picture books of the pyramids, chronologies of the pharaohs, “Life on the Nile”-type overviews. I saw the collection come in, and week after week I watched as its treasures scattered into the eager hands of dozens of different browsers. And just recently I saw this big hefty paperback volume on Akhenaten – a character who’s always fascinated me when I’ve encountered him in various novels, the 18th-dynasty successor to the great pharaoh Amenhotep III who changed his reigning name and then, about five years into his rule, tried to break with the hugely powerful priestly caste that effectively ruled huge chunks of Egyptian life.

It’s a very dramatic little interruption in the sprawling history of ancient Egypt. As one historian put it, it’s “a chance bivouac in the march of history, filled for a moment with all the movement and colour of intense life, and then was abandoned to a deeper silence, as the camp was hurriedly struck and the course of Egyptian history relapsed again into more wonted highways.” This characterization has always bothered me; the more you know about the lives of the pharaohs, the more unfair it seems that showboating oddities like Akhenaten grab so much attention (the same thing happens in spades to the relatively obscure and unimportant pharaoh Tutankhamen).

But even so! I snapped up this hefty 1991 paperback and settled in with reading it. And I was struck by how good Cyril Aldred is at what he does – unlike so many writers on ancient Egypt, he’s not only very imaginative but open to wonder, as when he writes about the remains of the great temple at Luxor:

The temple was once gorgeously decorated with gold, silver, lapis lazuli and coloured opaque glass, and furnished with sculptures in hard and soft stones; but only a few dispersed and usurped examples of the statuary bear some witness to its former magnificence. Despite its ruinous state, however, and the alterations it has suffered, its grandeur is still impressive particularly at sunrise, the moment of the temple’s awakening, when the Theban luminescence gives an almost translucent effect to the stone. The contrast between the rows of clustered papyrus-bud columns, where the diagonal shadows fall thick, and the broad areas of light in the open courts, the elegant balance of the proportions between the main structure and the soaring colonnade with its huge campaniform capitals, make it evident that within the rigid requirements of the Egyptian temple as a cosmological myth translated into stone, Amenophis III was able to call upon the services of a great architect whose work, however, was left unfinished at the end of the reign.

And Aldred also very calmly clarifies some of the standard misconceptions about Akhenaten, including the misconception that’s most visually obvious to casual museum-goers, the dramatic break that he made with the very rigid style of public illustration:

But actually Akhenaten did not alter a single convention of Egyptian drawing. The human figure continued to be rendered by the artist in the same visual terms as had persisted from archaic times when Egyptian art crystallized out at a conceptual state of its development in the service of the divine king, and adhered to the same conventions for as long as kingship lasted. Akhenaten’s innovations were mostly in the choice of subject-matter: style remained unchanged in its fundamentals, though the proportions of the human figure were adjusted to suit a canon which departed from the traditional, and, though varying, tended mostly to elongate the upper part of the body, particularly in the early part of the reign. These innovations are limited to the representations of the royal family.

All of which is so juicy and intelligent that you might wonder what could possibly be the danger I mentioned. Well, the danger comes from the sheer unending torrent of books rushing through the bargain carts – because about a week after I finished reading this 1991 paperback, I happened to notice a mention in my book-journal of the same book … but dating from July. So I shifted a sleeping basset hound off my pancreas, got up, and went on a little book-hunt. And sure enough, there it was: the original 1988 hardcover of Cyril Aldred’s Akhenaten book, hoovered up during some earlier visit and shelved in a hurry for later consumption.

Patrons of used bookshops in benighted places like Colorado don’t have this kind of problem. Their stock doesn’t change often enough to make it possible.

I’d rather have the bounty … and I’ve got a spare copy of this wonderful book.