His first novel, Prague, was a national bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book, and the recipient of the Los Angeles Times/Art Seidenbaum prize for best first novel. It has been translated into eight languages.

The Egyptologist is his second novel. He lives in New York with his wife and two sons.

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Anyone who has studied ancient Egypt will be familiar with Jean Francois Champollion. He was, after all, credited with deciphering hieroglyphics from the Rosetta Stone and thus giving scholars the key to understanding hieroglyphics. For this effort along, he is frequently referred to as the Father of Egyptology, for he provided the foundation that scholars would need in order to truly understand the ancient Egyptians. Even though he suffered a stroke, dying at the age of forty-one, he himself added to our knowledge of this grand, ancient civilization by translating any number of Egyptian texts prior to his death.

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Belzoni, an Italian, was the strong man of Egyptology, who worked in as a circus strongman in London prior to his explorations in Egypt. He was an imposing man with a height of about two meters (6ft, 6in). He was an adventurer and self taught archaeologist who possibly studied hydraulics, and who ended up working for the Egyptian vice regent, Muhammad Ali. He directed excavations, often using crude methods. However, he is credited with discovering the previously unknown upper entrance of Khafre's pyramid at Giza. He also documented and collected antiquities.

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Karl (Carl) Richard Lepsius (1810-1884) must be considered one of the founding fathers of Egyptology and a giant among the earliest archaeologists. He was born in Naumburg-am-Saale. During the days before formal Egyptology graduate programs, he spent years studying Champollion's Grammar in order to learn hieroglyphs, and then spent another four years visiting all of the major European collections of Egyptian antiquities in England, Holland and Italy in order to self educate himself in his chosen discipline. This is not to say that Lepsius was not formally educated. He studied Greek and Roman archaeology at the universities of Leipzig (1829-1830), Gottingen (1830-1832) and Berlin (1832-1833), where he completed his doctorate. His interest in Egyptology seems to have been inspired by lectures on the history of Egypt by Jean Letronne, a French classicist and archaeologist who had taken an early interest in the work of Champollion.

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Today, as always, there remains considerable debate over such matters as the age of the Great Sphinx, the means in which the Great Pyramids were constructed, as well as many other topics related to ancient Egypt. Some theories border on the fantastic, while others clearly step over that threshold. Of course, there are always arguments within the scope of scholarly investigation, but sometimes it seems that "alternative theories" receive the bulk of the media attention.

While many traditionally trained Egyptologists might consider themselves to be the guardians of reasonable scientific Egyptology, none is better equipped than one of the modern living legends of that discipline, Mark Lehner. Today, his is considered to be one of the foremost experts on the Giza Pyramids, having devoted most of his life to their study.

The English are well represented in the early discipline of Egyptology. One such individual was John Gardner Wilkinson, who first went to Egypt in 1822. He his sometimes referred to as the Father of British Egyptology. Wilkinson was the son of John Wilkinson, a clergyman from Hardendale in Westmorland, and Mary Anne Wilkinson, born to them on October 5th, 1797 at Little Missenden, Buckingshamshire. However, both his mother and father died before he reached the age of ten, after which he was entrusted to a guardian.

Wilkinson attended school at Harrow and at Exeter College, Oxford. However, he left Oxford in 1818 before earning a degree and joined the army. He loved to travel and made his first visits to the Continent in 1817 and 1818. In 1819, he set off on a tour through France, Germany and Italy, where he met the antiquarian and student of Egyptian hieroglyphics, Sir William Gell. Gell encouraged Wilkinson to leave the army and study Egyptology under his guidance, and in October of 1821, Wilkinson made his first visit to Egypt, at the age of 24, by way of Alexandria, which was the normal entry point in those days. This was a a year before Champollion rediscovered the principles of the Egyptian script.

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In the words of James Baikie, author of the book A Century of Excavation in the Land of the Pharaohs, "if the name of any one man must be associated with modern excavation as that of the chief begetter of its principles and methods, it must be the name of Professor Sir W.M. Flinders Petrie. It was he…who first called the attention of modern excavators to the importance f "unconsidered trifles" as means for the construction of the past…the broken earthenware of a people may be of far greater value than its most gigantic monuments."

William Matthew Flinders Petrie was the grandson of the first man to chart Australia. When he was four Petrie became so ill his mother became convinced that he was a weak child. Since she was a scholar herself, she taught him at home and introduced him to Hebrew, Latin and Greek. Later on, he was taught by a governess, but when he became ill again, his official education effectively ended.