Complete and unabridged, with 59 full-page plates by Willem van de Velde the Younger, Pieter van Bloemen and Andries van Eertvelt. Two sisters serve as recluses in the temple of Serapis at Memphis, pouring libations for the dead, and the younger, Irene, is noticed by the King — which is the worst thing that can happen to her. Ebers found the medical papyrus that bears his name and dug in Egypt for years; the Ptolemaic temple in this 1880 novel is reconstructed from papyri he had read himself, including the real petitions of real recluses. Fifty-nine plates of seventeenth-century painting, from Jan Brueghel the Younger to Pietro da Cortona, carry the Mediterranean shipping, storms and Egyptian thrones that surround this story of Roman power and Ptolemaic Memphis.
