THE DISCOVERY OF EGYPT

The author, an Australian Egyptologist, has a fine talent for animating some rather obscure events in the history of Egyptian excavations. Even without it, this chronology of pirates and Pashas, scientists and fools provides an intellectual adventure with an enduring interest. Just the story of Cleopatra's Needle, which now stands in New York City's Central Park, as it was discovered, noted and transplanted, will indicate the pleasant worth of Mr. Greeners' text. He has ably committed to paper the intellectual excitement of the travellers' accounts of the Middle Ages, and the courage and determination of such minds as Champollion (who deciphered the Rosetta Stone) and Mariette (who jettisoned a career as a second-rate journalist to become the century's foremost Egypotologist). His re-Discovery of Egypt has much of the informed enthusiasm of his earlier (1962) High Dam over Nubia and should attract that contemporary readership in search of antiquity.