The Critic in the Orient Part 13

EGYPT

Egypt has changed so much during the last twenty years that books written before that time are practically obsolete. The dahabiyeh is no longer used for Nile travel, except by tourists of means and large leisure, since the tourist steamers make the trip up and down the Nile in one quarter the time consumed by the old sailing vessels. Cairo has been transformed into a European city and even Luxor is modernized, with its immense hotels and its big foreign winter colony.

Baedeker's Egypt is the best guide book, but be sure that you get the latest edition, as the work is revised every two or three years. The introductory essays in this volume on Egyptian history, religion, art and Egyptology are well worth careful reading. The descriptions of the ruins and the significance of many of the hieroglyphs are helpful. Of general descriptive works on Egypt, some of the best are Penfield, _Present Day Egypt_ (1899); Jeremiah Lynch, _Egyptian Sketches_, a book by a San Franciscan which gives a series of readable pictures of Cairo and the voyage up the Nile; Holland, _Things Seen in Egypt_.

Of Egypt, before it was transformed by the British, standard works are Lane, _Cairo Fifty Tears Ago_; Lady Duff-Gordon, _Letters From Egypt_ (covering the period from 1862 to 1869). Good historical works are Lane-Poole, _Egypt, and the Story of Cairo_; Ebers, _Egypt, Descriptive, Historical, and Picturesque_.

Of the administration of England in Egypt, the best book is Lord Cromer's _Modern Egypt_. Other works are Milner, _England in Egypt_; Colvin, _The Making of Modern Egypt_. The story of Gordon's death at Khartoum is well told in Stevens, _With Kitchener to Khartoum_ and Churchill, _The River War_.

Several valuable works on Egyptian archeology have been written by Maspero and Flinders-Petrie. Maspero's _Art in Egypt_, which is lavishly ill.u.s.trated, will be valuable as a guide book. Flinders-Petrie's _Egyptian Decorative Art_ is worth reading.