Covers an amazing amount of ground (3000 years) and is generally very readable and easy to follow.

My only minor criticisms are that Wilkinson does not discuss the problems of interpreting the primary sources or the debates around specific issues in the main text. As far as these are addressed at all, they are relegated to the footnotes. At times, also, I felt that Wilkinson was over-selling the achievements of Ancient Egypt. Its cultural achievements and influence, for example, pale into insignificance when compared to that of the Greeks and Romans (and arguably of the Babylonians, Persians and Phoenicians too). And Wilkinson's persistent description of Ancient Egypt as a "world superpower" and "empire" are not convincing. There were no world superpowers in the ancient world, and for much of the period Egypt was not even the dominant regional power in the near east, while its "empire" even at its greatest extent was never more than a relatively limited set of territories in present-day Israel, Lebanon and Syria.