THE MAKING OF EGYPT By Flinders Petrie
Professor Flinders Petrie, who at eighty-five can look back over nearly sixty years of archaeological work in Egypt, has done a service to students by preparing this handy compendium of the results attained in the period. His new book (Sheldon Press, I2S. 6c1.) gives "a view of the many elements which were successively united in the people of Egypt," from the Stone Age to the Ptolemies. It is not easy reading, as it gives for each period the main anthropological and cultural details with references to the literature—principally the author's accounts of his excavations—and to the 85 plates and ntaP!• But for serious students the book will be invaluable, even if experts may not all agree with Professor Petrie's rather sweep- ing conjectures in the prehistoric chapters. It is interoting to note, in these days of superheated racial passion, the author s conclusion that each stage in the development of Egypt ".as due "to intermixture with an alien civilisation." Egypt. he says, "never originated any new civilisation, but was a fertile ground for implanting the products of other lands." .11'1'!t theory is, of course, abundantly confirmed in the text, and it has a special value for our generation.
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