Egypt under Amasis, 525 BC, on the eve of the Persian conquest: a Greek merchant's daughter is sent as a bride to the court, and the intrigue that follows brings Cambyses's army down the Nile. Ebers was a working Egyptologist — he found the medical papyrus that still carries his name — and wrote his novels to teach the period; every ceremony and title in it is sourced. Sixty plates of paintings by David Roberts and Lawrence Alma-Tadema carry the ancient world that Ebers reconstructed, from Cleopatra's Alexandria to the Roman ruins that later generations of artists imagined.
Egypt under Amasis, 525 BC, on the eve of the Persian conquest: a Greek merchant's daughter is sent as a bride to the court, and the intrigue that follows brings Cambyses's army down the Nile. Ebers was a working Egyptologist — he found the medical papyrus that still carries his name — and wrote ...