The Egyptian

The physician Sinuhe tells the story of his life across the turbulent reign of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten in fourteenth-century-BC Egypt. Waltari anchors it in the real ancient geography of the Nile: Thebes with its great temple of Amun, the House of Death across the river where Sinuhe learns his craft, Akhenaten's new sun-city of Akhetaten raised in the desert, the old capital of Memphis, and the far cities of the east to which Sinuhe's wanderings carry him.

Merit

Thebes and Karnak

The early books

In teeming Thebes, under the shadow of Amun's great temple, Sinuhe practises medicine among rich and poor and loves Merit, the tavern-keeper's daughter, the one steady tenderness of his restless life. The city, priest-ridden and magnificent, is the fixed point against which the coming religious upheaval is measured.

The early and middle books

explicit Sinuhe's Thebes is the real ancient capital of Waset at modern Luxor, dominated by the vast temple of Amun at Karnak; the city is the home he returns to and the tavern where the woman he loves, Merit, works.

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