Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/299

 1922 291 Short Notices Miss Lina Eckenstein, one of Flinders Petrie's excavating party of 1905-6 at the ancient Egyptian copper and turquoise mines, has written a little History of Sinai from the earliest times to the present day (London : Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1921). Egyptians worked the mines in Wadi Maghara and, offered at the neighbouring shrine of Hathor at Serabit El Khadim at least as early as the first dynasty, and thereafter, with interruptions, until the end of the New Kingdom, about 1100 B. c. In support of the evidence in the name of Sinai of a primitive worship of the moon-god (Sin), Miss Eckenstein quotes the oldest Egyptian monu- ments found on the spot ; and she would place the primary goal of the Exodus at the ancient cult-centre of Serabit. The next records of this barren region are graffiti of Nabataean caravans, after which arrives a flood of stories of anchorites and monasteries, and of pilgrims to the sacred places. In the fifth century came the remarkable lady Etheria who recognized all the landmarks of the Exodus, among them the vast ruts made by Pharaoh's chariot-wheels at Suez. The flood of Christianity has long since narrowed down to the convent of St. Catharine, and geographers and archaeologists in late years overshadow the pious bene- factors and pilgrims. Miss Eckenstein seems to have collected her facts and traditions industriously, so far at any rate as they are accessible in English, French, or Latin, and has furnished her book with a useful index ; but her bibliographical references are unsatisfactory, and she should have known that it was 'Abbas Hilmy and not Husein Kamil who succeeded Tewfik as khedive of Egypt in 1892. F. LL. G. Mr. P. A. Means, in his introduction to the Memorias Antiguas Historiales del Peru of Fernando Montesinos, which he has translated and edited for the Hakluyt Society (1920), attempts to ' strip away all the husks of credulity and superstition ' and to detect ' the folk-lore material hidden in Montesinos ', and particularly the part derived from the works, now lost, of the Jesuit Bias Valera. A series of tables gives Maya chronology from 150 B. c. and Andean chronology from A. D. 150, Montesinos's list of ninety pre-Inca kings, and the editor's revised list which reduces the number to about fifty, and lastly an outline of Andean history based on archaeological research and an adaptation of the list of kings to the result of these researches. The book is intended for ' the student of Andean proto-history '. F. A. K. The fifth, sixth, and seventh volumes of the handsome edition of The Collected Historical Works of Sir Francis Palgrave, K.H., published at the Cambridge University Press (1921), contain The History of the Anglo- U2