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Richard  Abbott

Scenes from a Life

Literature & Fiction

What journey would you make to encounter the meaning of a dream? Makty-Rasut is a scribe in New Kingdom Egypt, fashioning tombs for the elite. He lives a comfortable but restless life, moving every few years further upstream along the river Nile. He is content to exercise his talent without examining his origins. Then a series of vivid dreams, interpreted with the help of a senior priest, disrupts this pattern. To solve the riddle, he must go on a journey that will take him outside the Beloved Land and away from the life that he knows. His travels take him into the neighbouring province of Canaan, to a hill-country village called Kephrath, and to a way of life he has never before considered.

Book Bubbles from Scenes from a Life

The start of chapter 8

This portion takes us back a long way in Makty-Rasut's life, to the time when he was adopted by chantresses of the Temple of Hekhet in the Nile Delta region. His mother has been sent away out of Egypt, and he is essentially homeless and rootless at this point of the story.

From chapter 5

Chapter 5 - like all of the odd-numbered chapters - takes the storyline forwards in time. Here, the tomb that Makty-Rasut has been working on for several months has just been finished.

Opening paragraphs

This is the start of Scenes from a Life - we are introduced to Makty-Rasut, an Egyptian scribe living near the town of Waset, nowadays called Luxor.

In a Milk and Honeyed Land

Literature & Fiction

In a Milk and Honeyed Land is a novel about everyday life about 3,000 years ago in the hill country of Canaan - now called Israel and Palestine - close to the end of the time of Egyptian rule of that province. It explores how the vast changes in lifestyle, politics, religion and music that occurred in that area between what archaeologists call the Bronze Age and Iron Age might have been mirrored by individual people's words and actions. The large-scale actions and military campaigns of the Egyptian pharaoh and other great kings are nowhere in sight; this is a story of the resources and people available within four small allied communities. Damariel is apprenticed as a young man by the village priest, whose reckless actions lead to his disgrace. Damariel manages to avoid becoming implicated in the matter and carries on his training, marrying his childhood friend Qetirah shortly before they begin their shared ministry in the town. Feeling ashamed of their continuing inability to have children, Qetirah becomes pregnant by the chief of the four towns, but the pregnancy is difficult. Damariel's anger and outrage spills over into the marriage. He holds the chief responsible for the situation but cannot see how to get either justice or revenge...

Book Bubbles from In a Milk and Honeyed Land

Prelude

This section is the prelude to In a Milk and Honeyed Land, setting the wider background and context to the story which follows

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