I am very happy to announce that my book Silent Images: Women in Pharaonic Egypt has just been re-released by the American University in Cairo Press in a beautiful new paperback edition. I am honored that the new edition includes a foreward by H.E. Mrs. Suzanne Mubarak, Egypt's First Lady, who inspired the original work.

The book was born in 1995. At that time, Dr. Forkhanda Hassan, a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh who was assisting Mrs. Suzanne Mubarak in organizing events dedicated to women’s issues, asked to meet with me. Dr. Forkhanda told me that Mrs. Mubarak was planning to attend the Fourth UNESCO World Conference on Women in Beijing, and wanted me to write a book on women in ancient Egypt.

At that point, I was not working at Giza, for reasons that I have written about before. I had time to research the subject in great depth, and I feel that the book turned out extremely well. One day, Dr. Forkhanda asked me to meet Mrs. Mubarak - I was so happy to do so! I went with Dr. Forkhanda to the presidential residence. It was the first time that I had ever met the First Lady, and I was delighted to find that she is a lovely person, quite modest and intelligent. When I finished the book, the First Lady reviewed it with me.

Farouk Hosni, Egypt’s Minister of Culture, published the book the first time, but I asked to retain the rights to publish it abroad. My friend Mark Linz, head of the American University Press, arranged for it to be re-published in English, Mondadori released it in Italian, and Harry Abrams re-published it a second time in English. It has also been translated into French, and even into Japanese, and it has been released in Arabic by Dar El-Sharouq under the name “Ladies of the Ancient World.”

I still have wonderful memories of working on this book. When I started thinking about the title, I found that every book written previously on the subject had a title like “Women in Ancient Egypt,” or “Women in Pharaonic Egypt.” I wanted something more unique, however. I went to the home of a friend of mine, El-Hany El-Zayat, at Fayed on the the water. I stayed there for three days, thinking the whole time about what I should call the book. While I was falling asleep at night, I reflected on the fact that we almost never hear the voices of ancient Egyptian women themselves - essentially everything that we know about them was written by men. We see only pictures of women, and are left to imagine what they might have said. The title “Silent Images” came from this thought. My dear friend Angela Jones edited my manuscript. We both agreed that this title was both unique and appropriate. When the time came to choose an image for the cover of the new paperback edition, I thought immediately of the beautiful fragment of an Amarna period statue in the Metropolitan Museum, which shows only a pair of lips, I believe that these are surely the lips of Queen Tiye. This piece is the perfect embodiment of the title Silent Images.

Now, 14 years after the book first came out, people around the world still love to read about the women of ancient Egypt. My good friend Mark Linz, the head of the American University in Cairo Press, decided that it was time to give Silent Images a makeover as a beautiful but affordable paperback. I was honored that Mrs. Mubarak accepted a copy of the new edition when she was at the American University in Cairo for the opening of its new campus. It is clear that the women of ancient Egypt are still very much alive in the hearts of people all over the world.