Pharaoh

Acknowledgements

I am most grateful to my agent, Luigi Bonomi, and to my editors, Sherise Hobbs in London and Tracy Devine in New York; to my previous editors, Martin Fletcher and Caitlin Alexander; to Jane Selley for her excellent copyediting of this and my earlier novels; to Lucy Foley for her work in getting this book into production; to the rest of the team at Headline, including Katie Day, Darragh Deering, Marion Donaldson, Frances Doyle, Jo Liddiard, Jane Morpeth, Tom Noble, Barbara Roman and Ben Willis, and to the Hachette representatives internationally; to Alison Bonomi, Amanda Preston and Ajda Vucicevic at Luigi Bonomi Associates, and to Nicky Kennedy, Sam Edenborough, Mary Esdaile, Julia Mannfolk, Jenny Robson and Katherine West at the Intercontinental Literary Agency; and to Gaia Banks and Virginia Ascione at Sheil Land Associates.

I am grateful to my mother Ann Verrinder Gibbins for her critical reading of all my work, to my brother Alan for diving with me and for his photography and video work for my website www.davidgibbins.com, and to Angie Hobbs for her support. Much of the inspiration for this novel came during periods of travel and exploration funded in part by grants from the Palestine Exploration Fund, the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust. For unpublished material and help during research, I am grateful to the staff of the British Museum, the Ashmolean Museum, the Oriental Collections of the British Library, the National Army Museum and the Royal Engineers Museum and Library at Chatham in Kent; I am also grateful to John Denner, Fred Van Sickle and Paul Clare for assisting in my ‘experimental archaeology’ with Martini-Henry and Remington rifles of 1884–5 vintage; and to Peter Nield of Warwick School for his help with books onthe Sudan of the 19th century.

This novel is dedicated to my daughter Molly, with much love.