Kara Cooney Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Kara Cooney is a published author better known as Dr. Kara Cooney or by her full name Dr. Kathlyn M. Cooney.

She is known for being an Egyptologist. She is also an Assistant Professor of Egyptian Art and Architecture at UCLA. She was given a PhD in 2002 from Johns Hopkins University for Near Eastern Studies. Kara also belonged to an archaeological team that was excavating at Deir el Medina, an artisans’ village in Egypt. She also excavated at Dahshur and at different tombs at Thebes.

Born on March 8, 1972 in Houston, Texas, Kara was a Kress Fellow at the National Gallery of Art. She also worked on the prep for the Quest for Immortality: Treasures of Ancient Egypt, which was an exhibition at the Cairo Museum. She belonged to the teaching staff at Stanford and Howard University.

Kara was a fellow curator for Tutankhamun in 2005, and also worked on the Golden Age of the Pharaohs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She grew up in Houston and attended higher learning locally, going to the University of Texas and graduating with her B.A.

Kara has also been featured on the smaller screen for her knowledge and expertise as well. She has worked on the Discovery Channel documentary series Out of Egypt, which aired in 2009, and Egypt’s Lost Queen, which featured Dr. Zahi Hawass.

The author has done academic work that largely keeps its focus on afterlife beliefs, death preparations, and gender studies. She has worked on looking into coffin reuse during the Bronze Age Collapse, which let her look at funerary objects in many different museums throughout the world, in Cairo, Paris, London, New York and more. Today she resides in Los Angeles.

The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Egypt and the Modern World is a 2021 book by Kara Cooney. If you enjoy a good nonfiction book, you are going to really like this work. Cooney looks into the lives of five interesting pharaohs who were able to see over Egypt with complete power, showing more about the three thousand year old empire of the country and what it might mean for us today.

Kara focuses on five different Egyptian pharaohs in this book. They are Khufu, Senwosret III, Akenhaten, Taharqa, and Ramses II. In a time when many democracies are threatened, she turns to these five figures in order to help the reader get why people often give up power to the few and what it might end up meaning for the future.

The pharaohs were the first centralized power to exist on the Earth, and their process of divine kingship is able to show and tell quite a bit when it comes to the politics of the world, both past and present. Every god with an animal head, each temple, pyramid and tomb gives quite a bit of insight into a culture that is able to meld deeply held religious beliefs with human schemes to shore up a system and justify the hierarchy that had one ruling over the many.

There’s Khufu, the man who constructed the Great Pyramid at Giza to honor his own reign, and then Taharqa, the last pharaoh who did what he could in order to restore greatness to Egypt. Get a clear look into figuring out how power was earned, controlled and then manipulated in the olden times.

By turning to the past, Cooney is able to get to the bottom of the reason why societies have seemed to have selected a dictator over democracy throughout the years. Interesting and based in history, find the relevancy to modern times or just absorb the way that things were in the past by checking out this book!

Recycling for Death: Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt and the Theban Royal Caches is a 2024 book by Kara Cooney. Whether you are interested in Egypt as a topic or just love anything nonfiction that lets you learn, this is a great book to check out.

It’s a detailed study of the economic, social and religious importance of coffin reuse and development that took place during the Ramesside and early Third Intermediate periods. Funerary datasets are the main source for social history in Egyptology. The various coffins, tombs, mummies, and Books of the Dead from the 20th and 21st dynasties have not been wholly used in this aspect, probably most likely due to the fact that the data from this time period was scattered and tough to synthesize.

This book is the result of the author conducting coffin study for fifteen years. Inside, she analyzes coffins as well as different funerary equipment of the elites stretching from the 19th to the 22nd Dynasties, giving windows into social strategies and adaptations that were used during the collapse of the Bronze Age and then the re-consolidating that took place during the next age, the Iron Age.

A lot of the 20th to 22nd Dynasty coffins show that they have been reused from older coffins. They also tend to show obvious marks where the inlay or the gilding might have been removed. Vignettes that were painted onto the surfaces of the coffins also show different new religious strategies and coping mechanisms that were used during this crisis period.

Mummification techniques and their advances are able to show an Egyptian anxiety about burial in the long term without coffins present as a new type of mummy that was stuffed and painted was brought out for the wealthy.

A complex coffin style also came out thanks to long term burial without the painted tomb chapels. The beginning of the book focuses on coffin reuse (theory and evidence) along with the social collapse that made up the 20th and 21st Dynasties. The second part of book has a collection of photo essays of annotated visual data for many different Egyptian coffins for the reader to enjoy. Whether you know a lot about Egypt or don’t know much but have always wanted to learn, this is a great book. Grab a copy and start impressing everyone you know with your new-found knowledge on coffin reuse in ancient times!