They don't write them like this any more

You may think that writers like Christian Jacques or films like "The Mummy" take liberties with Egypt and spice up the reality in order to make a story that will sell, but believe me much worse was being written 100 years ago! Or was it worse?

It was Shirley Addy's talk to the Manchester Ancient Egypt Society in October 1999 about Rider Haggard that first put me on to this extraordinarily imaginative writer's interest in Egypt, so I was intrigued to find a book of his in a dark second-hand bookshop in Shropshire. It is "The World's Desire", written jointly by Haggard and Andrew Lang. Maurice Greiffenhagen provided illustrations which, in Victorian England, must have been quite risque.

As I read it I realised that I had not begun to appreciate the extent to which Egypt can arouse the imagination and breed the fantastic. I could hardly believe it when I found myself presented with the scene of a banquet in the court of the Pharaoh in which, in one room, the writers had placed Merneptah and his wife Meriamun, Moses and Aaron (well, they must have been there or somewhere like it at some Pharaoh's court) and - wait for it - Odysseus! Talk about stretching history to the limits - this must take the biscuit! The more so because, just down the road, we are asked to believe, the local temple has been taken over by Helen of Troy masquerading as Hathor!

This is a tale as tall as a skyscraper. It seems that just as the troubles of poor Merneptah with his Hebrew slaves is coming to a head, with frogs, flies, blood in the Nile, etc., a strange woman appears and takes over the temple of Hathor. She is so beautiful she bewitches all the red-blooded men who swoon after her and mostly come to a sticky end. (This is made rather hard to take seriously because Greiffenhagen shows Helen as a cold, pale aloof woman in whose mouth butter clearly wouldn't melt, while the Egyptian women who try to hold their men back from her are generously curved, lightly clad and clinging.)

Then to crown it all this superannuated Greek turns up. Years ago he sacked Troy and, although he made it home to Ithaca, he contracted terminal wanderlust and is now searching for he knows not what. Of course it turns out to be a woman he is after, and that woman is Helen aka "The False Hathor".

However the real fly in the ointment, for both Merneptah and Odysseus, is Meriamun, who is a really nasty piece of work, made very dangerous because she has access to the "Ancient Evil", which turns out to be a snake with a human head who manages to spoil everyone's plans and ensure that, far from living happily ever after, some of them don't live ever after at all and those that do live miserably. The first-born die, Merneptah gets poisoned, Odysseus is killed leading what is left of the Egyptian army (after the problem at the Red Sea) in successfully beating off the Sea People, Meriamun gets exactly what she deserves, and Helen wanders off into the night. You know what happened to Moses and Aaron.

It is a rip-roaring yarn of the type you cannot put down, gripping and exciting, and total rubbish! There is even a camel in it. And yet Herodotus tells the story that when Paris abducted Helen from Sparta intending to take her to Troy his ship was blown to Egypt in a storm, where he was arrested. He was expelled back to Troy but only after his Greek booty, including Helen, was confiscated. Helen remained in Egypt throughout the war and was restored to Menelaus, her rightful husband, at the conclusion of hostilities. Of course Herodotus believed any story he was told, but he was influential. In embroidering the tale Euripides had it both ways. In "The Women of Troy" he has Helen residing in the city during the siege and getting a lot of stick at the end for causing all the trouble, but in "Helen" he has her sitting it out in Egypt putting about the unlikely story that it was only a phantom in her shape that Paris took back to Troy. (Euripides got that idea from an earlier poet called Stesichorus.)

Haggard and Lang published their book in 1890, at the time when Petrie and Schliemann were astounding the world with their discoveries and revealing some of the contacts between Greece and Egypt. At about that time (long before David Rohl had re-examined the chronology) it began to be believed that the l3th century bce was remarkable because it contained not only the l9th Dynasty and the Exodus but also the siege of Troy. So it only needed the feverish imagination of a man like Haggard to put two and two together to make about twenty five, and you have a tale that is enthralling but ridiculous, sinister but laughable, weighty but light as a feather. It's worth a read!