Pyramid

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’m most grateful to my agent, Luigi Bonomi, and to my editors, Tracy Devine and Sarah Murphy in New York, and Marion Donaldson and Sherise Hobbs in London; to my previous editors Caitlin Alexander and Martin Fletcher; to Crystal Velasquez and Kay Gale for their copyediting; to the rest of the teams at Bantam Dell and Headline, including Jo Liddiard, Jane Morpeth, Tom Noble, and Ben Willis; to the Hachette representatives internationally, including Donna Nopper; to Alison Bonomi, Amanda Preston, and Ajda Vucicevic at Luigi Bonomi Associates; to Nicky Kennedy, Sam Edenborough, Mary Esdaile, Julia Mannfolk, Jenny Robson, and Katherine West at the Intercontinental Literary Agency; to Gaia Banks and Virginia Ascione at Sheil Land Associates; and to my many foreign publishers and their translators.

I owe a continuing debt to Ann Verrinder Gibbins for her critical reading of all my writing, and for her support. The formative period of travel and fieldwork behind this novel was funded by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, the Palestine Exploration Fund, and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. I’m grateful to the staff of Cambridge University Library for allowing me to examine original documents from the Cairo Geniza when I was a graduate student there, to the Royal Engineers Museum and Library in Chatham for help with research on the officers who appear in this novel, and to Peter Nield for introducing me to recent work on the life of the caliph Al-Hakim. Finally I owe a special thanks to my daughter for organizing a trip to the Black Country Museum in England, where I was able to “wall-walk” a barge in an underground canal just as I have imagined happening in Egypt more than three thousand years ago.