[DeepL Translation - needs review] Fascinated by the ancient Egyptian civilization, Allen becomes an archaeologist of his dreams. However, while excavating the ruins, he is caught in a rockfall accident and is transported back in time to the 18th dynasty of Egypt! Suspected as a spy, he is captured by Nephele, the brother-in-law of the king (Pharaoh). The cold-hearted and ruthless young general, who has sworn allegiance to the king, has Allen tortured, but...? The origin of "FLESH&BLOOD," a ...
(Note: this review is for the 2014 version of the book. Trigger warning for the book: rape.)
As archeologist Allen begins investigating the ancient ruins of Amarna, he's caught underneath a falling boulder. Upon opening his eyes, he finds out that not only has he not been crushed flat, but he's somehow time-traveled 3,000 years into the past, into the heyday of Amarna and its pharaoh, Akhenaten. He's quickly found and picked up by the pharaoh's younger brother, Nefer (ネフェル), and must find his place in a time he knows only by hearsay in a language he's only ever read.
I really enjoyed this book; the author writes a combination of idealized love and harsh reality (a bit more of the former and a bit less of the latter, but nevertheless present) that I like. She's incredibly diligent about her research as well, and a good chunk of the early bit of my time reading this book was falling down Wikipedia rabbit holes looking up all the information and being amazed by a period of Egyptian history I never knew existed: that of a time when the capital was uprooted and the state religion changed to one of monotheism. Her あとがき even lists out a short bibliography of her research material that I was tickled to see; I'll list it at the end of the review for those curious.
I only had two major issues with the book; both of these are major spoilers, the first more so, but I want to list them here to air out my feelings.
Due to those couple of issues, I think my ideal for this book would be to be split into two smaller books, in order to be able to dedicate the page count to smoothing them out. But I'm overall very pleased with what I got, and as a bonus, I found out something fun while reading: this book was originally published in 1994, and then reprinted in 2014, 20 years later. I have both versions of the book, and while comparing the illustrations in the two, noticed that the text had been revised! As of this review I haven't been able to read the 1994 version, but I'd really like to now to compare them.
The vast majority of the difficulty of this book came from the domain-specific vocabulary and the highly formal language spoken in Ancient Egypt. The grammar can get a little tough as well (it'll be good to have some N1 under your belt), but if you can push through, the difficulty smooths out nicely, and by the end I didn't really need to look anything up.
And finally, here are the sources cited in the 2014 version of the book, for those curious: