HOW DJADJA-EM-ANKH SAVED THE DAY
By
As twenty maidens row up and down to amuse bored King Seneferu, the helm girl stops steering because she has dropped her amulet into the water; Djadja-em-Ankh, the court magician, saves the day by folding half the lake water ""right over on top of the other"" so that the amulet can be retrieved and the rowing resumed. That's the 3500-year-old story, unimpressive in itself, but almost secondary here to the trappings with which Manniche, an Egyptologist, has decked it: there are illustrations copied from contemporary drawings, ancient copies of the story in both hieratic (corresponding to our script) and hieroglyphic texts, and Manniche's little lectures on hieroglyphic characters, the making of papyrus, the jobs of a scribe, and life in King Seneferu's palace. Together it could make for an appealing social studies supplement, and the format--enclosed in an envelope, the attached ""pages"" fold out into one long strip rather than a bound book--gives it a legitimate sort of novelty. (There is a ""special deluxe edition"" rolled in a tube, more ""authentic"" perhaps but even less likely for library circulation.)