Hello historians! Can anyone suggest to me some resources for getting an idea of what daily life was like in ancient Egypt? My book is going to start in the New Kingdom period. The main character will be a priest, so resources on the lives of priests would be particularly prized. I've done an awful lot of googling but it's hard for the uneducated to sift real information from conjecture and New Age nonsense. A resource for lists of names would also be fantastic - the names of pharaohs are easy, but I get the impression that kings and queens had very different naming conventions from common people (or priests).
I'm looking for books, websites, documentaries, anything to give me enough information to make someone familiar with the history go "oh, this person did some research!" even if it's not perfect. I know I can't become an Egyptologist just to write the first half of the book, but I'd like to make Egyptologists not hate me for writing badly about the time period. (Even though I'm writing about a man who is an immortal magical mummy.)
I wrote a bit about the life of wealthy people in ancient Egypt in What did being wealthy look like in the bronze age? Not all Egyptian priests lived luxuriously, of course, but higher-ranked priests were fairly well-to-do.
There are many good resources on daily life in ancient Egypt, but I recommend beginning with Daily life in Ancient Egypt: Recreating Lahun by Kasia Szpakowska and Village Life in Ancient Egypt: Laundry Lists and Love Songs by Andrea McDowell. The former draws upon textual and archaeological sources from Lahun/Kahun, a Middle Kingdom pyramid town, and the latter focuses on life in Deir el-Medina, the New Kingdom village of the artisans who created the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. The only other New Kingdom city that has been well explored is the short-lived city of Amarna (ancient Akhetaten), and The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti: Amarna and Its People is a fascinating read. Lacovara's The World of Ancient Egypt: A Daily Life Encyclopedia and Peck's The Material World of Ancient Egypt are other excellent resources, as are all of the books in the Shire Egyptology series.
I provided a reading list for Egyptian religion in this thread. For the lives of priests, the best resource is Sauneron's The Priests of Ancient Egypt, although he draws heavily on sources from the Greco-Roman period. Chapter 2 of Teeter's Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt is also a pretty good overview of the Egyptian priesthood. Finally, chapter 5 of The Egyptians is dedicated to priests.
Ranke's Die Ägyptischen Personennamen remains the standard resource on Egyptian personal names. Harvard has free PDFs of the volumes.
For New Kingdom names, especially if you don't read German, I think it's fine to start with Who's Who at Deir el-Medina, which has a very nice selection of names and gives you an idea of the relative popularity of each name.