Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/870

 86o Reviezvs of Books Amenemhet I. is corroborated by the monuments. The introductory narrative may therefore be accepted as essentially historical, and the fact that it contains the earliest known account of Palestine would alone constitute ample justification for its insertion. With reg-ard to the Sphinx Stele (Vol. II., §8io ff.) and the Bentresh Stele (Vol. III., §429 fif.) the case is not so clear. Both these monuments are certainly apocryphal, as Professor Breasted of course points out. They were composed at a late period for the pur- pose of enhancing the importance of certain deities, and the Bentresh Stele, especially, is full of historical absurdities, though it may possibly preserve the traces of a genuine tradition. The introductory narrative of the Westcar Papyrus and the legendary account of the beginning of the Hyksos wars in Sallier I. would seem to have quite as good a claim to be included in the work, though both are omitted. Nevertheless these texts are interesting, and it was probably well to include them as specimens of what the Egyptians themselves regarded as history, especially as it is now well known that both Herodotus and Manetho drew largely from just such sources as these. It perhaps is to be re- gretted that, except the Abydos inscription of the reign of Khenzer (Vol. I., §781), Professor Breasted does not give any monuments of the Hyksos period. The historical material for this period is so scanty that even the smallest scrap of information is important, and at least the date (thirty-third year of Apophis) from the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, or the Bubastis inscription of Apophis (Naville, Bubastis, I. 35 c) might well have found a place. Omissions of this kind are, how- ever, so rare that they only emphasize the general completeness of Professor Breasted's work. The translations exhibit the same careful attention to matters of detail that is everywhere apparent. Lacunae, restorations, variant readings, and words of doubtful import are carefully marked, and while comparison with the origirial is facilitated by numbering the lines in superior type, the te.xt is conveniently divided into paragraphs in ac- cordance with the subject matter. The employment of headings, indi- cating the contents of the respective paragraphs, may be noted as a use- ful device. Paraphrases are scrupulously avoided and the endeavor has been made to give a rendering as closely literal as possible without doing violence to English idiom. In this difficult endeavor Professor Breasted has been, as a rule, most successful, and his translations are in all respects the best that have as yet appeared in English. Here and there, perhaps, his close adherence to the phrasing of the original may cause some difficulty, but in all such cases the needfjil explanation is furnished by the foot-notes. A close translation of this character, which faithfully reproduces the spirit and flavor of the original, is certainly, in spite of some occasional harshness, far better than a smooth rendering in which the difficulties are glossed over and a thoroughly un-Egyptian point of view is read into the texts.