The Egyptian Book of the Dead: What It Actually Was
In the New Kingdom you could walk into a workshop and buy a Book of the Dead ready-made. The scribe had already written the…
Author
Mahboob Alam
Mahboob Alam founded Egyptian Secrets out of a long-standing fascination with ancient Egypt. What began as personal reading — archaeology books, excavation reports, museum publications, and following new research online — turned into a decision to build somewhere the accurate version of these stories could live. He is not a practising Egyptologist and does not claim to be. What he does is read the specialist literature carefully, represent it accurately, and translate it for readers who want more than a surface summary. Where scholars disagree, he says so. Where the evidence runs out, he says that too. Alongside the site, he produces short-form video on ancient Egyptian history for social platforms. Corrections are welcome — particularly from people who work in the field.
Anubis: Egypt’s God of Embalming and Why He Isn’t a Jackal
Beneath the desert at Saqqara there is a catacomb holding roughly eight million animal mummies. Almost all of them are canines, and a striking…
The Valley of the Kings: Why Egypt Abandoned Pyramids for Hidden Tombs
In 2022, a British-Egyptian team working in the desert wadis west of Luxor found a staircase and a blocked doorway. The assumption was that…
The Great Sphinx of Giza: What the Evidence Actually Shows
In 1378, a Sufi named Muhammad Sa’im al-Dahr came to Giza and found local farmers leaving offerings at the Sphinx in the hope of…
Egyptian Hieroglyphs: How They Work and How They Were Cracked
Sometime in the summer of AD 394, a priest at the temple of Philae carved a short message into the stone. It was a…
Ancient Egyptian Gods: The Complete Guide to Egypt’s Deities
Egyptologists have catalogued well over a thousand named ancient Egyptian gods. Some presided over the sun and the cosmos. Others watched over a single…
Cleopatra: The Last Pharaoh, Beyond the Beauty Myth
Here’s a fact that resets everything you think you know about Egyptian history. Cleopatra lived closer in time to the first Moon landing than…
How Were the Pyramids Built? What the Evidence Actually Shows
Introduction Imagine you’re standing at the base of the Great Pyramid in the year 2560 BCE. It isn’t ancient yet. It’s a construction site.…
Ancient Egyptian Mummification: How the 70-Day Process Worked
Introduction Imagine you’re an embalmer in Egypt three thousand years ago. A body has just been delivered to your workshop on the west bank…
Ancient Egypt Census: How Pharaohs Counted Every Household, Field, and Cow
Introduction Imagine you’re standing in a limestone courtyard just after sunrise. Two hundred families are already there, lined up in rows that stretch toward…