Egyptomania: A History of Fascination, Obsession and Fantasy
Ronald H. Fritze
History, sociology, archaeology
The very last sentence of Egyptomania is this:
Why Egypt is so attractive in popular culture remains something of a mystery, but its existence is undeniable.
That's on page 377. Three hundred seventy seven pages is an awful lot of book to write (or read) without reaching a conclusion. Egyptomania is, basically, a 1.5-inch-thick Wikipedia "In Popular Culture" section. There are paragraphs, sections, and one entire chapter that could have been deleted without much loss. If the book isn't quite a list of everything everyone ever said or wrote or filmed about Egypt, it's not for want of trying.
As a compendium, Egyptomania is not without its charms. Fritze, although an academic, writes in good clear English rather than in High Academicese, and he displays an excellent sense of humor:
In the case of Isis Unveiled, the Masters provided precipitated pages of text The problem was that many of the precipitated pages had been copied from works by other writers without attribution. Someone had plagiarized and that person was either Blavatsky or one of those Masters. Since an ascended Master would never stoop to plagiarism, that leaves Madame Blavatsky.
But I have to wonder what its editor was doing. For one thing, Egyptomania has a raft of basic copy-editing errors, including serial abuse and neglect of the common North American semicolon. For another, some of the book's assertions should have been gently fact-checked out of existence, such as the frankly bizarre statement that The Hound of the Baskervilles "drew its inspiration from the curse of the 'Unlucky Mummy.'" For a third, there are some exceedingly abrupt logical breaks and grammatical solecisms. Look again, for example, at that closing sentence quoted above. Grammatically, the "it" in "its existence is undeniable" can only refer to Egypt itself. While Egypt's existence is indeed undeniable, I don't think that's what Fritze meant to say.
Finally, there's a lot of repetition. Also, things get repeated a lot. Not only that, the same basic facts are reiterated over and over. Halfway down page 134 we learn that "Renaissance Rome was the one place in the Europe of that era where a visitor could see and study a large number of Egyptian monuments and artefacts." At the bottom of the same page, we find out that "Rome was the one place in Europe where people could see a large amount of Egyptian artefacts without having to travel to Egypt." It's not just individual factoids; whole paragraphs are rehashed--if not quite so blatantly--two or three times over. This was vexing in Istanbul; in Egyptomania it's completely out of control.
As a resource for scholars, Egyptomania is admirably thorough. As a book for general readers, it's in need of some serious editorial TLC. It's not an unenjoyable read on the tactical level; as a whole, though, it will appeal mainly to the sort of reader who likes reading catalogs.
Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea
Gary Kinder
History, archaeology
It's hard to go wrong when you're starting with disaster at sea, sunken treasure, a slightly larger-than-life protagonist, and high tech exploration. Gary Kinder doesn't disappoint. SoGitDBS is a page turner. It reads like a cross between drama-at-sea journalism (e.g. The Perfect Storm, Dead Wake) and the meticulous biography-centered investigations of Tracy Kidder. It's non-fiction that reads like a novel.
There is, furthermore, a curious and surprising sequel. The book came out in 1998. Subsequent to its publication . . . stuff happened. I'm not going to spoil it. Only, after you read it--not before!--you should Google for the primary protagonist.
Ivory Vikings: The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman Who Made Them
Nancy Marie Brown
Art, archaeology
This is a frustrating book about the Lewis Chessmen. It has some really good good parts, and it has some really disappointing not-so-good parts.
Brown wants to assert that a woman known as Margaret the Adroit ("the most skilled carver in Iceland", according to an Icelandic family saga) created the Lewis chessmen for the 12th-century bishop Pall Jonsson. To get there, however, she has to make a series of assumptions, many of which are unstated. To detail only the grossest level: if the chessmen came from Iceland, and if they would have been considered a work of unusual skill, and if they were made for Bishop Pall, then it is plausible that Margaret made them. That's a lot of ifs for a person whose entire documented existence consists of a sentence or two. Some of the reasoning is decidedly dodgy, along the lines of what historical person X "would have said" or "would have thought". I can't help but suspect that Brown started with the conclusion, and then worked backward.
(Also: an author who chooses to put as her biographical blurb the facts that she speaks Icelandic and lives in Vermont with four Icelandic horses does nothing to dispel my impression of a deep and perhaps non-dispassionate connection to the subject. I freely admit that this is blatant stereotyping and unjustifiable speculation on my part.)
Then, too, Brown is not a master of factual organization. She has a clever approach--each chapter is named for a chess piece, and she uses that piece to explore the social history and position of both the piece and its real-world counterpart. Unfortunately, in doing this, she is forced away from a chronological approach. That's not necessarily bad, but Brown doesn't pull it off; she darts back and forward in time, with similarly-named actors doing similar things in different chapters, and loses the thread repeatedly.
On the other hand, the Icelandic-origin theory seems (at least according to Ivory Vikings) to have been unfairly pooh-poohed by scholars. The competing origin fables--Norway is the most popular--are also highly speculative. More importantly, Iceland wasn't some provincial backwater, but a wealthy and flourishing (if hard and remote) society. So Brown at least deserves credit for establishing that "plausible" thing.
But where she truly excels is in evoking the lost, strange, brutal, evocative, beautiful Northern world. And it truly was a world--an economic and cultural continuum spanning from Greenland into Russia, not long past the paganism of Thor and Odin, where trading and raiding coexisted for centuries: a place in the medieval European orbit, but fully not of it. There are stories here to conjure with, and names as well: Erlang Skew-Neck, King Magnus III Barelegs, Unn the Deep-Minded, Harold Hard-ruler, Ketil Flat-Nose. There are intrepid venturers in "white gold", walrus ivory. There are feuds and betrayals and ironic humor. In the best parts of Ivory Vikings, Braun dives deep into both the facts and the stories of the North, with particularly good scholarship on the Icelandic sagas.
I don't know that I'd be in a rush to read another non-fiction book by Nancy Marie Brown. On the other hand, if she ever publishes any translations of those sagas, I'm there.
