Lapy OF THE Two LANDs: Five Queens of Ancient Egypt, by Leonard Cot- trell (Bobbs-Merrill, $7.50). The author obviously loves his work of popularizing archaeology, and in the main he does it well. His new- est book is a romp through the closing years of the Eighteenth Dynasty and the beginning of the Nineteenth—and through the sec- ondary rubble of academic clamor and contention accumulated over the past century or so. The five queens, as he presents them, are fascinating: Hashepsowe (Hat- shepsut), who ruled as a Pharaoh, shouldering her way past various Amenophisids; Tiye, who took charge of importing concubines for her uxorious royal husband; _ imperishable Nefertiti, whom Cot- trell as much as suspects of mas- terminding husband Akhenaten’s religious revolution; Ankhesna- mun, the child bride of King Tut, and Nefertari, who stands still at Abu Simbel, dwarfed between the massive legs of her massively ego- tistical husband, Ramesses II. At the outset, Cottrell promises to stick to the all too scanty facts about his subjects—but so scanty are they that he pads the book out with speculation (some idle, most interesting) and, bless him, with wonderful excursions into the world of the archaeologist (there is a diverting examination of the controversy over just where Ak- henaten was buried and whether he suffered from a strange glandu- lar disease, complete with in-fight- ing in the columns of learned jour- nals and testimony from a re- spected physician of Edinburgh). And, as always, he conveys the sense of place and past: he takes us to the Nile valley, and we see
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