Dinner with King Tut

Sam Kean's Dinner with King Tut follows experimental archaeologists, the researchers who test the ancient world by rebuilding it rather than only digging it up. Kean travels with them from the Andes to the South Seas, baking Egyptian sourdough and brewing ancient beer, making blades from obsidian, tattooing by methods used around 500 AD, firing medieval siege weapons and putting to sea in ancient-style vessels.

The organising idea is the five senses. Kean is after the tang of Roman fish sauce, the smell of a mummification workshop, the noise and danger of a Bronze Age street, rather than the dates and dynasties that usually stand in for a lost civilisation. Between the field reports he writes short invented scenes of ancestral life, built on what the experiments turned up.

Published by Little, Brown in July 2025, it was named one of The New Yorker's best books of the year and shortlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.