5,203 years ago, cruel eastern invaders annihilate villages in the wintry Sakros Mountains. Survivors flood west into the fertile plain between the rivers, seeking refuge among its walled cities. Three shepherd boys see their families executed and flee to one of their caves, where they find eight starving girls and bodies of others. Unwilling to abandon them, the boys hide them in a remote cave in the high forest, and feed and equip them until they're fit to travel. Weida, widowed princess of an overrun kingdom, joins them on their trek to Ausgrenor. She seeks Patros, widower-brother of her late husband. Fortified cities fall. Ausgrenor stands alone. Terrified citizens regress into savagery. Their vicious king plots to rob the rich and flee. Neighboring Bedu tribes slip away into the desert. Invaders approach. Patros is torn between ancestral loyalties and survival of his new wards. Fight or flee. Now or never. Thus begins the six-novel Raising Up Pharaoh epic, set among the emerging city-states and nations in the Fertile Crescent at the dawn of written history-as they plant the cultural seeds of today's world. The series is written for readers of all ages. The tone is intense, yet controlled by zooming back the lens to avoid needless close-ups of violence and sexuality. The tale unfolds through the differing viewpoints of the orphans, the couple, others drawn to them, and their foes. This first book's setting ranges across the southwestern mountains of what is now called Iran, southern Iraq between the lower Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the marshes of their delta with the Persian Gulf, and is bounded on the west by the Saudi Arabian desert. In later books, the setting expands throughout the Middle East, the Steppes, West and South Asia, and Northwest Africa. Each book has its own maps. The diverse cast speaks a pidgin of proto-Indo-European, proto-Afro-Semitic, and various lost languages such as Harappan. The pidgin is presented in modern U.S. English. The Raising Up Pharaoh novels were edited by Dr. Dennis E. Hensley PhD
About the Author: R. E. J. Burke is a former U. S. Marine, graduate of the University of Maryland and Yale Graduate School, aeronautical engineer, shipbuilder, banker, entrepreneur, author, and Christian speaker. His passion is the archaeology of the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age in Western Asia, Eastern Europe, and Northeastern Africa, which led to his writing the six-novel Raising Up Pharaoh epic. Having lived in Asia, South America, the U.S. Midwest and on both coasts, he and his wife, Nancy, now live on the bluffs by the Potomac River in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. They have four adult children and six grandchildren, for whom they are very thankful. His favorite authors are Patrick O'Brian, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Dickens, Bernard Cornwell, C. S. Lewis, and Stephen R. Donaldson.