Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Hubert Robert and Jean-Léon Gérôme. Egypt under Amasis, 525 BC, on the eve of the Persian conquest: a Greek merchant's daughter is sent as a bride to the court, and the intrigue that follows brings Cambyses's army down the Nile. Ebers was a working Egyptologist — he found the medical papyrus that still carries his name — and wrote his novels to teach the period; every ceremony and title in it is sourced. Sixty plates of paintings by David Roberts and Lawrence Alma-Tadema carry the ancient world that Ebers reconstructed, from Cleopatra's Alexandria to the Roman ruins that later generations of artists imagined.