Charming, 11 Dec 2001
Excellent book entering the complex entangles of the Mayan calendar system in a clear and explanatory way. This fascinating example of cosmological structure and knowledge is probably one of the most charming mysteries of ancient civilisations and this book offers a great deal of insights.

Charming, 11 Dec 2001
Excellent book entering the complex entangles of the Mayan calendar system in a clear and explanatory way. This fascinating example of cosmological structure and knowledge is probably one of the most charming mysteries of ancient civilisations and this book offers a great deal of insights.

Time is a man-made invention, duration is not, 08 Jan 2008
The first interest of the book is that it collects the essential data about how time is measured by human beings. Even if the author shows the main two methods : lunar and solar calendars, and the hybrid third solution, he shows that measuring time was never a purely temporal objective. It did not try to establish some absolutely material count of time or dating, because that was impossible, because the lunar cycle or the solar cycle are not absolutely regular, just the same as the earth's cycle. The author shows that dating was always dominated, determined by some necessities in society: the crops, the various rites and rituals, hence religion and many others, including of course political and ideological contingencies. This leads us to the obvious conclusion that time is not a natural category or concept. It is human. Time is not invented by man in its flowing always changing phenomena connected to the universal, be they cyclical like days, lunar months, solar months, seasons, years, or be they accidental like a natural catastrophe for one example. But time is nothing but a human invention in the seriating it implies that enables human beings to measure their activities and their history. History only concerns human beings, not plants nor animals. And if we can write the history of a plant or even a rock, it is because we project our own vision of time into the plant and the rock. History is also a human invention within the desire of and the need for human beings to remember, understand, plan and foresee its various activities on various scales. The best example is the week. The old (Roman and Babylonian) eight day system, then the 7 day system after the seven planets of the solar system including Venus (known by some as the morning star, the "star" behind Horus for an Egyptian example) and the moon ( the satellite of the earth). But the attempts at having other weeks are funny and yet very clear. The French Revolution and its ten day decades got rid of Sunday as one rest day out of seven to replace it by one day of rest every ten days. If you add to that the banning of religious festivities, particularly the Nativity week, the Passion week and the Assumption week, you have a real regressive social policy there. On the other hand the replacing in 1929 of the seven day week by a five day week by Stalin with one day of rest every five days (instead of one every seven days), but that day of rest was rotated among workers divided in five fifths according to their resting day is progressive on the amount of rest and regressive on the level of family life and even social life. This reform was quickly modified to a set and common day of rest for everyone but this time once every six days in 1931, to be finally restored on the basis of a seven day week in 1941. We can see in such schemes anti-religious intentions but also economic intentions to make people work more (for the French Revolution) or less (for the Soviet Union's first and even second reform). This book thus shows marvelously how man-made all the time measuring units are, be they seconds, minutes, hours, days even, weeks, months, seasons and years, even if man tried to build them on the observation of the moon and the sun, but in order to satisfy man's needs, desires, ideological intentions, economic necessities, etc. Time and history are man-made scales though history is basically the result of nothing else but the dynamics and contradictions of naturally produced structures then influenced and used by man and human groups.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines


Lots of detail - too much?, 24 Jun 2007
This book is packed with details of how humans measure time. However, the amount of detail, and the way it is presented can be overwhelming.

What I wanted from this book was an understanding of how different cultures measure time today, backed up by historical information. What I got was an in-depth study of the historical basis for measuring time, but confusion over how things stand today. Take the chapter on Easter. Huge amount of detail over the history of how it was calculated, but I'm none the wiser about how it's calculated today.

I would have preferred a layout where the start of each chapter briefly described how things are today, and then went into more detail. The approach the author has taken leads to a lack of clarity, and a book that is a chore to read.

Short and Sweet, 22 Jan 2006
Number 133 in the OUP’s VSI series is not, as you might imagine, an introduction to cosmology. Rather it examines the history of human measurement of time. This is mainly from a Western European perspective. For anyone who merely wants a Very Short Review, I felt morally compelled to buy it after I realised I was well into the second chapter while browsing through it.

The book has seven chapters, the opening one of which is the day. The day is the most easily recognised astronomically defined period, but Holford-Strevens shows that there are still problems in measuring it. For instance, when does it start? At sunrise? At sunset? At midnight? The need to come to a common measurement is the central them of chapter one, which ends with the adoption of Universal Time by a reluctant France.

Chapters two (Months and Years) and three (Prehistory and history of the modern calendar) follow. The earlier chapter is effectively an introduction to the astronomical basis of what follows, explaining where the concept of month and year come from. The later chapter may touch on prehistory, but I must have blinked and missed it. This is no loss as the firm evidence for prehistoric calendars is slight. The chapter instead draws from the Roman Republican period through the acceptance of the Gregorian calendar, in one form or another, across Europe. This section is rather brief, but it the problem is rectified by chapter four, Easter. Effectively this is a case study of how you work out the time for the major event in the liturgical calendar. Interestingly Holford-Strevens doesn’t just chronicle the development of the mechanics of calendar. He also shows how time-keeping is political. How could protestant countries adopt a Catholic reformation of the calendar?

Chapter five, weeks and seasons, deals with non-astronomically defined periods of time, though an ancient Babylonian may disagree. Essentially unlike a day, month or year, there is no compelling reason to have a seven week calendar, and many good reasons not to. This chapter shows the important of the week in the Jewish faith and how there has been a fight to ensure the week remains even in recent times. It also mentions the aftermath of the French Revolution and the attempt to decimalise time, with no lasting success.

The book is hugely dominated by the classical tradition. Only in chapter six is there much discussion of other cultures such as the Chinese or the Mesoamericans. This is the weakest chapter of the book. It’s not that what is written is wrong, but summarising the magnificently intricate calendrical systems of Mesoamerica (and which one, the Mayan? the Aztec?) in just two small pages of text is so slight that you can’t help but wonder if the space could have been better used embellishing the core text, which is rather good.

The book ends with the naming of years and, later, eras. Again the chapter is more superficial than I would have liked. There is a lot you can say about this even from a purely classical perspective. There is the real problem of lack of space, but dropping chapter six could have made more space for Holford-Strevens to do what he does well. However, it’s the nature of these books that aspects will always have to be sacrificed. It certainly not as good on the classical period as Robert Hannah’s recent book on Greek and Roman Calendars, but this isn’t a fair criticism considering the size of the book. By and large what it does, it does extremely well. There were no points where I yelled at the book for making a superficial error, as I have with some calendrical books I’ve read.

It’s a book which shows how brave the OUP is willing to be with the series. I can imagine a market for the VSI Classics, Shakespeare or Marx, but did the board of the OUP meet and tell each other that what they really needed was an accessible introduction to horology? It’s also well illustrated, which in my view is an excellent thing. It helps to be able to see what a diagonal calendar is, or what the Coligny calendar looks like.

If you’re looking for an affordable book to bring you over the ‘free delivery’ size for an order, then it’s well worth considering.

The Oxford Companion to the Year is one of those splendid volumes that should have a permanent place in every personal reference library, next to your well-thumbed Brewer's.

The main body of the book gives a huge amount of historical and folkloric information on everyday of the year (including, yes, 30th February, which has happened three times), on the days of the week, months and seasons, and on the major feast days and festivals in a wide variety of different cultures. This is the section that readers will find most fascinating; its 658 pages provide endless browsing.

The second part concentrates more on the making of calendars over the centuries: how our own complex calendar evolved with its irregular month lengths and its rules for when leap year occur, plus details of the calendars of many other cultures--Chinese, Hindu, Muslim and many more--all trying to find a regular system which can cope with the fact that the roughly 29½ day lunar month and the roughly 365¼ day solar year simply can't be matched.

Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens must be congratulated on the huge amount of work this book must have taken, with such splendid results. --David V Barrett

Charming, 11 Dec 2001
Excellent book entering the complex entangles of the Mayan calendar system in a clear and explanatory way. This fascinating example of cosmological structure and knowledge is probably one of the most charming mysteries of ancient civilisations and this book offers a great deal of insights.

Time is a man-made invention, duration is not, 08 Jan 2008
The first interest of the book is that it collects the essential data about how time is measured by human beings. Even if the author shows the main two methods : lunar and solar calendars, and the hybrid third solution, he shows that measuring time was never a purely temporal objective. It did not try to establish some absolutely material count of time or dating, because that was impossible, because the lunar cycle or the solar cycle are not absolutely regular, just the same as the earth's cycle. The author shows that dating was always dominated, determined by some necessities in society: the crops, the various rites and rituals, hence religion and many others, including of course political and ideological contingencies. This leads us to the obvious conclusion that time is not a natural category or concept. It is human. Time is not invented by man in its flowing always changing phenomena connected to the universal, be they cyclical like days, lunar months, solar months, seasons, years, or be they accidental like a natural catastrophe for one example. But time is nothing but a human invention in the seriating it implies that enables human beings to measure their activities and their history. History only concerns human beings, not plants nor animals. And if we can write the history of a plant or even a rock, it is because we project our own vision of time into the plant and the rock. History is also a human invention within the desire of and the need for human beings to remember, understand, plan and foresee its various activities on various scales. The best example is the week. The old (Roman and Babylonian) eight day system, then the 7 day system after the seven planets of the solar system including Venus (known by some as the morning star, the "star" behind Horus for an Egyptian example) and the moon ( the satellite of the earth). But the attempts at having other weeks are funny and yet very clear. The French Revolution and its ten day decades got rid of Sunday as one rest day out of seven to replace it by one day of rest every ten days. If you add to that the banning of religious festivities, particularly the Nativity week, the Passion week and the Assumption week, you have a real regressive social policy there. On the other hand the replacing in 1929 of the seven day week by a five day week by Stalin with one day of rest every five days (instead of one every seven days), but that day of rest was rotated among workers divided in five fifths according to their resting day is progressive on the amount of rest and regressive on the level of family life and even social life. This reform was quickly modified to a set and common day of rest for everyone but this time once every six days in 1931, to be finally restored on the basis of a seven day week in 1941. We can see in such schemes anti-religious intentions but also economic intentions to make people work more (for the French Revolution) or less (for the Soviet Union's first and even second reform). This book thus shows marvelously how man-made all the time measuring units are, be they seconds, minutes, hours, days even, weeks, months, seasons and years, even if man tried to build them on the observation of the moon and the sun, but in order to satisfy man's needs, desires, ideological intentions, economic necessities, etc. Time and history are man-made scales though history is basically the result of nothing else but the dynamics and contradictions of naturally produced structures then influenced and used by man and human groups.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines


Lots of detail - too much?, 24 Jun 2007
This book is packed with details of how humans measure time. However, the amount of detail, and the way it is presented can be overwhelming.

What I wanted from this book was an understanding of how different cultures measure time today, backed up by historical information. What I got was an in-depth study of the historical basis for measuring time, but confusion over how things stand today. Take the chapter on Easter. Huge amount of detail over the history of how it was calculated, but I'm none the wiser about how it's calculated today.

I would have preferred a layout where the start of each chapter briefly described how things are today, and then went into more detail. The approach the author has taken leads to a lack of clarity, and a book that is a chore to read.

Short and Sweet, 22 Jan 2006
Number 133 in the OUP’s VSI series is not, as you might imagine, an introduction to cosmology. Rather it examines the history of human measurement of time. This is mainly from a Western European perspective. For anyone who merely wants a Very Short Review, I felt morally compelled to buy it after I realised I was well into the second chapter while browsing through it.

The book has seven chapters, the opening one of which is the day. The day is the most easily recognised astronomically defined period, but Holford-Strevens shows that there are still problems in measuring it. For instance, when does it start? At sunrise? At sunset? At midnight? The need to come to a common measurement is the central them of chapter one, which ends with the adoption of Universal Time by a reluctant France.

Chapters two (Months and Years) and three (Prehistory and history of the modern calendar) follow. The earlier chapter is effectively an introduction to the astronomical basis of what follows, explaining where the concept of month and year come from. The later chapter may touch on prehistory, but I must have blinked and missed it. This is no loss as the firm evidence for prehistoric calendars is slight. The chapter instead draws from the Roman Republican period through the acceptance of the Gregorian calendar, in one form or another, across Europe. This section is rather brief, but it the problem is rectified by chapter four, Easter. Effectively this is a case study of how you work out the time for the major event in the liturgical calendar. Interestingly Holford-Strevens doesn’t just chronicle the development of the mechanics of calendar. He also shows how time-keeping is political. How could protestant countries adopt a Catholic reformation of the calendar?

Chapter five, weeks and seasons, deals with non-astronomically defined periods of time, though an ancient Babylonian may disagree. Essentially unlike a day, month or year, there is no compelling reason to have a seven week calendar, and many good reasons not to. This chapter shows the important of the week in the Jewish faith and how there has been a fight to ensure the week remains even in recent times. It also mentions the aftermath of the French Revolution and the attempt to decimalise time, with no lasting success.

The book is hugely dominated by the classical tradition. Only in chapter six is there much discussion of other cultures such as the Chinese or the Mesoamericans. This is the weakest chapter of the book. It’s not that what is written is wrong, but summarising the magnificently intricate calendrical systems of Mesoamerica (and which one, the Mayan? the Aztec?) in just two small pages of text is so slight that you can’t help but wonder if the space could have been better used embellishing the core text, which is rather good.

The book ends with the naming of years and, later, eras. Again the chapter is more superficial than I would have liked. There is a lot you can say about this even from a purely classical perspective. There is the real problem of lack of space, but dropping chapter six could have made more space for Holford-Strevens to do what he does well. However, it’s the nature of these books that aspects will always have to be sacrificed. It certainly not as good on the classical period as Robert Hannah’s recent book on Greek and Roman Calendars, but this isn’t a fair criticism considering the size of the book. By and large what it does, it does extremely well. There were no points where I yelled at the book for making a superficial error, as I have with some calendrical books I’ve read.

It’s a book which shows how brave the OUP is willing to be with the series. I can imagine a market for the VSI Classics, Shakespeare or Marx, but did the board of the OUP meet and tell each other that what they really needed was an accessible introduction to horology? It’s also well illustrated, which in my view is an excellent thing. It helps to be able to see what a diagonal calendar is, or what the Coligny calendar looks like.

If you’re looking for an affordable book to bring you over the ‘free delivery’ size for an order, then it’s well worth considering.

Two books in one, the second better than the first, 09 Feb 2000
This is a fascinating tome. The first half is like many others - information apporpriate to every day of the Year, although it was nice to see 30th February! It is the second half that is excellent - the answer to every question you could have about the calendar, and putting other less well researched books to shame - all others I've read, in fact! If you are interested in our calendars, this is a must - even for the price!

Charming, 11 Dec 2001
Excellent book entering the complex entangles of the Mayan calendar system in a clear and explanatory way. This fascinating example of cosmological structure and knowledge is probably one of the most charming mysteries of ancient civilisations and this book offers a great deal of insights.

Time is a man-made invention, duration is not, 08 Jan 2008
The first interest of the book is that it collects the essential data about how time is measured by human beings. Even if the author shows the main two methods : lunar and solar calendars, and the hybrid third solution, he shows that measuring time was never a purely temporal objective. It did not try to establish some absolutely material count of time or dating, because that was impossible, because the lunar cycle or the solar cycle are not absolutely regular, just the same as the earth's cycle. The author shows that dating was always dominated, determined by some necessities in society: the crops, the various rites and rituals, hence religion and many others, including of course political and ideological contingencies. This leads us to the obvious conclusion that time is not a natural category or concept. It is human. Time is not invented by man in its flowing always changing phenomena connected to the universal, be they cyclical like days, lunar months, solar months, seasons, years, or be they accidental like a natural catastrophe for one example. But time is nothing but a human invention in the seriating it implies that enables human beings to measure their activities and their history. History only concerns human beings, not plants nor animals. And if we can write the history of a plant or even a rock, it is because we project our own vision of time into the plant and the rock. History is also a human invention within the desire of and the need for human beings to remember, understand, plan and foresee its various activities on various scales. The best example is the week. The old (Roman and Babylonian) eight day system, then the 7 day system after the seven planets of the solar system including Venus (known by some as the morning star, the "star" behind Horus for an Egyptian example) and the moon ( the satellite of the earth). But the attempts at having other weeks are funny and yet very clear. The French Revolution and its ten day decades got rid of Sunday as one rest day out of seven to replace it by one day of rest every ten days. If you add to that the banning of religious festivities, particularly the Nativity week, the Passion week and the Assumption week, you have a real regressive social policy there. On the other hand the replacing in 1929 of the seven day week by a five day week by Stalin with one day of rest every five days (instead of one every seven days), but that day of rest was rotated among workers divided in five fifths according to their resting day is progressive on the amount of rest and regressive on the level of family life and even social life. This reform was quickly modified to a set and common day of rest for everyone but this time once every six days in 1931, to be finally restored on the basis of a seven day week in 1941. We can see in such schemes anti-religious intentions but also economic intentions to make people work more (for the French Revolution) or less (for the Soviet Union's first and even second reform). This book thus shows marvelously how man-made all the time measuring units are, be they seconds, minutes, hours, days even, weeks, months, seasons and years, even if man tried to build them on the observation of the moon and the sun, but in order to satisfy man's needs, desires, ideological intentions, economic necessities, etc. Time and history are man-made scales though history is basically the result of nothing else but the dynamics and contradictions of naturally produced structures then influenced and used by man and human groups.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines


Lots of detail - too much?, 24 Jun 2007
This book is packed with details of how humans measure time. However, the amount of detail, and the way it is presented can be overwhelming.

What I wanted from this book was an understanding of how different cultures measure time today, backed up by historical information. What I got was an in-depth study of the historical basis for measuring time, but confusion over how things stand today. Take the chapter on Easter. Huge amount of detail over the history of how it was calculated, but I'm none the wiser about how it's calculated today.

I would have preferred a layout where the start of each chapter briefly described how things are today, and then went into more detail. The approach the author has taken leads to a lack of clarity, and a book that is a chore to read.

Short and Sweet, 22 Jan 2006
Number 133 in the OUP’s VSI series is not, as you might imagine, an introduction to cosmology. Rather it examines the history of human measurement of time. This is mainly from a Western European perspective. For anyone who merely wants a Very Short Review, I felt morally compelled to buy it after I realised I was well into the second chapter while browsing through it.

The book has seven chapters, the opening one of which is the day. The day is the most easily recognised astronomically defined period, but Holford-Strevens shows that there are still problems in measuring it. For instance, when does it start? At sunrise? At sunset? At midnight? The need to come to a common measurement is the central them of chapter one, which ends with the adoption of Universal Time by a reluctant France.

Chapters two (Months and Years) and three (Prehistory and history of the modern calendar) follow. The earlier chapter is effectively an introduction to the astronomical basis of what follows, explaining where the concept of month and year come from. The later chapter may touch on prehistory, but I must have blinked and missed it. This is no loss as the firm evidence for prehistoric calendars is slight. The chapter instead draws from the Roman Republican period through the acceptance of the Gregorian calendar, in one form or another, across Europe. This section is rather brief, but it the problem is rectified by chapter four, Easter. Effectively this is a case study of how you work out the time for the major event in the liturgical calendar. Interestingly Holford-Strevens doesn’t just chronicle the development of the mechanics of calendar. He also shows how time-keeping is political. How could protestant countries adopt a Catholic reformation of the calendar?

Chapter five, weeks and seasons, deals with non-astronomically defined periods of time, though an ancient Babylonian may disagree. Essentially unlike a day, month or year, there is no compelling reason to have a seven week calendar, and many good reasons not to. This chapter shows the important of the week in the Jewish faith and how there has been a fight to ensure the week remains even in recent times. It also mentions the aftermath of the French Revolution and the attempt to decimalise time, with no lasting success.

The book is hugely dominated by the classical tradition. Only in chapter six is there much discussion of other cultures such as the Chinese or the Mesoamericans. This is the weakest chapter of the book. It’s not that what is written is wrong, but summarising the magnificently intricate calendrical systems of Mesoamerica (and which one, the Mayan? the Aztec?) in just two small pages of text is so slight that you can’t help but wonder if the space could have been better used embellishing the core text, which is rather good.

The book ends with the naming of years and, later, eras. Again the chapter is more superficial than I would have liked. There is a lot you can say about this even from a purely classical perspective. There is the real problem of lack of space, but dropping chapter six could have made more space for Holford-Strevens to do what he does well. However, it’s the nature of these books that aspects will always have to be sacrificed. It certainly not as good on the classical period as Robert Hannah’s recent book on Greek and Roman Calendars, but this isn’t a fair criticism considering the size of the book. By and large what it does, it does extremely well. There were no points where I yelled at the book for making a superficial error, as I have with some calendrical books I’ve read.

It’s a book which shows how brave the OUP is willing to be with the series. I can imagine a market for the VSI Classics, Shakespeare or Marx, but did the board of the OUP meet and tell each other that what they really needed was an accessible introduction to horology? It’s also well illustrated, which in my view is an excellent thing. It helps to be able to see what a diagonal calendar is, or what the Coligny calendar looks like.

If you’re looking for an affordable book to bring you over the ‘free delivery’ size for an order, then it’s well worth considering.

Two books in one, the second better than the first, 09 Feb 2000
This is a fascinating tome. The first half is like many others - information apporpriate to every day of the Year, although it was nice to see 30th February! It is the second half that is excellent - the answer to every question you could have about the calendar, and putting other less well researched books to shame - all others I've read, in fact! If you are interested in our calendars, this is a must - even for the price!

Helps you follow the Egyptian Calendar, 29 May 2005
This book is an adaptation of authentic ancient Egyptian calendars found in various museums and the calendar used today by a modern teaching order of Egyptian Mysteries. Based on translations by well known Egyptologists, the calendar has been recreated for use by practitioners who follow the Egyptian pantheon. It is a calendar of Egyptian Deities and their celebrations.

Much research has gone into this small handbook. While based on a few Dynasties giving us written material and particular pantheons within the Egyptian Religion, it does give us a very good overview and snapshot of what the calendar of the Egyptians was and how Religion did influence the entire being of the Egyptian people.

The calendar of the Egyptians does not reflect any of the European calendars we are familiar with. There were only three seasons: Inundation- when the Nile flooded, Emergence - when the waters receded and the crops were planted, and Harvest. We see the impact of nature and cycles and the growing season on the lives of the Egyptian peoples, same as we see in the European cultures, but the latitude and longitude dictates very different cycles and seasons.

Ms. Draco does include much history on the culture and religion of the Egyptian peoples. Actually, one and the other are inseparable, as you can not separate the culture from the religion.

The book follows the year according to the Egyptian calendar but also offers correspondences to our current calendar, making it easy to follow. Starting with the flooding of the Nile in Dhwy or July (mid July) by our calendar, the cycle is followed and explained.

The author tries to cover all the major Deity events. She covers many dynastic periods where various pantheons were prominent and certain Deities survived from one dynastic period to another. Brief histories are given, certain Deities are covered, feast days are noted and Festivals are recorded. All this information is gleaned from various documented sources, coming from actual recorded texts. There is nothing here that appears to be added or included because of lack of clarity on the occasion or the translation.

Samplings of the actual practice of the Religion are also included as quotes from prayers from various texts. Prayers and invocations from such sources as the Unas funerary temple inscriptions, various versions of the Book of the Dead, or the Papyrus of Nefer-uben to name a few, offer insight into the culture and religious beliefs of the peoples of the time.

There is also discussion on various important items to the beliefs and culture of the people at that time. The importance of cattle and how this fit into the religious beliefs of the people, the spread of the Cult of Isis of Egypt into the rest of the world and it's impact on the other cultures, the craft of Basketry; there is a lot of miscellaneous information here that will add to your knowledge base of the Egyptian peoples as well as fill up your mind with some wondrous facts.

Hieroglyphs are also explored here, one for each month, with the focus on how this glyph fits into the material discussed.

Each day is also discussed in its relationship to the month, the worship of a Deity or even if it is considered a lucky or unlucky day. Depending on events that occurred either in the Mythology or the history of the area, some days are labeled accordingly. Again, the author provides more information that will add to your knowledge base of the Egyptian people.

Each day does have the corresponding date from our current calendars so the book is very easy to follow. The material is not bogged down in details yet the information appears to be complete enough and contains all you need to know to have a general understanding of what is going on. The facts are there and they are referenced so you can track them back if you want to check the references or do more research on the topic. The book is also indexed.

Overall, this is a very informative book, and if you are a practitioner who follows the Egyptian Pantheons, or if you are just curious about the culture and religion of the peoples of Egypt, you will find this little gem hard to ignore. This is a good choice to augment your library on Egyptian Myths and Religions. boudica