SOURCE: “Intimately Egyptian,” in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4685, January 15, 1993, p. 7.

In the following mixed review, Soueif argues that, although In an Antique Land is an admirable attempt at recreating the past, the book seems incomplete.

It is a habit of certain traditional Jewish (and indeed Islamic) communities to preserve everything they have ever written. Special chambers are used for this, and the aim is to protect any written form of the name of God from inadvertent mistreatment. Such a chamber (a “Geniza”) was attached to the Synagogue of Ben Ezra in old Cairo; members of the city's Jewish community from well before the tenth century until the end of the nineteenth deposited all their writings there. The story of how the Geniza Collection came into the possession of Cambridge University Library is, sadly, the story of so much of the heritage of our so-called Third World: a fragment...