Books in Brief

Excavating in Egypt—The Egypt Exploration Society 1882–1982

T. G. H. James, editor (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago & London, 1982) 192 pp., $22.00

In honor of its one hundredth anniversary, the Egypt Exploration Society has published this commemorative volume, modest in size, but full of fascinating information on the history of the oldest organization devoted to archaeology in the Nile Valley. The editors have arranged the material on geographical lines and assigned the authorship of each chapter to a different scholar. The book is well illustrated with photographs and maps and is provided with notes on sources, a list of participating institutions and a good index.

Although written by a number of scholars—is multiple authorship becoming something of a fad?—the book is consistently of a quality that sets it far above similar works that concentrate on the history of the discipline itself. In fact, in the chapters by M. S. Drower (“The Early Years”), Cyril Aldred (“Amarna”) and T. G. H. James (“The Archaeological Survey”), the style is something of a model for aspiring young scholars to copy and a yardstick by which to measure their own work.