Sticks, Stones & Shadows, Building Egyptian Pyramids, Isler: Hardback: 1st Ed

Sticks, Stones & Shadows: Building the Egyptian Pyramids

By Martin Isler. Foreword by Dieter Arnold.

Published by University of Oklahoma Press, Oklahoma, 2001. First edition. Hardback cover with dust jacket (unclipped), 352 pages. Black & white illustrations and photography throughout.

CONDITION
Overall excellent condition, see photos. No names or writing. Images crisp & clear throughout.

What do the pyramids of Egypt really represent? What could have driven so many to so great, and often so dangerous, an effort? Was the motivation religious or practical?

Richly illustrated with more than 300 photographs and drawings, Sticks, Stones, and Shadows presents an entirely original approach to the subject of pyramid building. Unlike other books discussing these majestic structures, this book reveals the connection between devices that served both a practical need for survival and a spiritual belief in gods and goddesses.

Few have closely examined Egyptian technologies and techniques from the origins of pyramid development to the step-by-step details of how the ground was levelled, how the site was oriented, and how the stone was raised and placed to meet at a distant point in the sky. Nevertheless, this is much more than a how-to-do-it book. Martin Isler also asks and answers questions virtually ignored for the last century. He discloses, for example, the ancient use of shadow s- now denigrated to the ornamental backyard sundial-but once an important tool for telling the height of an object, geographical directions, the seasons of the year, and the time of day. Isler also reinterprets the ancient "stretching of the cord" ceremony, which once was thought to have only religious significance but here is shown as the means of establishing the sides of a pyramid.

MARTIN ISLER, a sculptor and President of InfoGraphics, a New York City trial graphics firm, lives in Wilton, Connecticut. He has studied the Egyptian pyramids for nearly thirty years and is the author of several articles
on their construction

DIETER ARNOLD is Curator of Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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