Pepi and the Secret Names

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outstanding picture book - Rated
If you're trying to get a child of 6+ interested in Ancient Egypt (which is on Key Stage 2 History) you can't find anything better than this. Pepi is a little boy whose father is painting gos on the walls of a Prince's Tomb. When Pepi learns his father has to paint a lion from memory, he goes to the edge of the desert and calls up a real lion, saying he knows its secret name. The lion tells Pepi that if he guesses wrong, he'll eat him - but Pepi gets it right. A wild hawk, a crocodile and a snake all follow, and the tomb is a great success - not least because Pepi's father has included a painting of the Lady Tmaio, an uninvited animal dear to the Prince.
What makes this enchanting story so special is a number of things. The secret names are given in hieroglyphs, which a child then has huge fun working out. The pictures are quite superb pastiches of real tomb paintings, and invaluable for nay school project on this culture. Best of all, there is the prose of an outstanding writer, who summons the lion, hawk, crocodile and snake as vividly as if she has their secret names too.