DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
Austin, Texas 78712-1086 * ( 512 ) 471-4206 * FAX ( 512 ) 471-6535

4/19/96

Dennis Forbes, Editorial Director
Editorial and Business Office
KMT, A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt
1531 Golden Gate Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94115

Dear Sir,

I have enjoyed KMT for some time now, with its generally clear writing and wonderful illustrations. Two of the book reviews in Volume 7, Number 1, however, make me wish for a bit more objectivity.

First, with respect to Monarchs of the Nile by Aidan Dodson, it strikes me as slightly unprofessional to have one contributing editor of a journal review the work of another in that journal; particularly when the review has such glowing praise as " done a masterful job of recounting the known histories...", and " especially readable volume ", whether the praise is deserved or not.

Second the review of The Scandal of the Century by Christine Mansoor seems to be rather jaundiced. Granted, the title and the dust jacket contain some hyperbole ( which is what one frequently finds nowadays in titles and dust jackets, as publishers want to sell their books ); and the author, a Mansoor may well ( and as you put it, understandably ) hold some strong personal feelings about the collection. But that does not make her documented history of the collection " biased " as you put it. That is to say, she may be biased in her feelings, but her documentation of the account doesn't seem to me to be biased. If you disagree with the documentation, I think you owe the readers of the review some statement of where you differ and why, even in a short review.

Your review makes it clear that what you call paranoia in Christine Mansoor's account is not paranoia at all, but rather an accurate perception, not of a " conspiracy of villains "but rather a lack of objectivity and a great deal of unscholarly behavior on the part of several Egyptologists.

Having read the book and visited the Amarna website, it is my understanding that really only one scholar has both seen examples from the Mansoor collection and produced a negative written evaluation. I have to figure that the opinion(s) of anyone who writes positively or negatively about the collection without having seen it must be discounted as being uninformed. Yet you claim that fewer than six ( of the literally hundreds of Egyptologists of the last 50 years ) have not " dismissed these sculptures as blatant ( even ugly ) forgeries not worthy of serious consideration on a scholarly level." If you are correct, this means that literally hundreds of ( professional ) Egyptologists have generated or passed on negative opinions about potentially important pieces without ever having studied ( or even seen ) them. To me that smacks of gossip and unscholarly behavior of precisely the sort that Christine Mansoor is talking about.

Of course your own information may not be entirely correct as stated as well as implied in the review. Perhaps not every Egyptologist other than the dozen or more that have written favorably about the Mansoor collection is in fact willing to " dismiss...as blatant ( even ugly ) forgeries" these quite beautiful pieces. If this is the case, then you really presented a quite slanted picture of the situation.

And finally I must say that you completely missed the boat in your review's misrepresentation of the role of non-Egyptologist scientists with respect to both Egyptologists and Christine Mansoor. Contrary to your statement that C. Mansoor was trying to " validate the opinions of several non-Egyptologist specialists( geologists, chemists, etc. )that the sculptures in question were indeed carved in antiquity...", she was using their considered opinions based on scientific examination to verify the authenticity of the Amarna artifacts. These scientific specialists are in a position with their tools and scientific methodology to validate or invalidate the " opinions " of Egyptologists with respect to the authenticity of the Amarna artifacts, whose opinions are sometimes based primarily on stylistic criteria and sometimes on unfounded assumptions about the physical and chemical nature of materials of which the artifacts are composed, particularly on the surface. Your dismissal of these scientists in an offhand comparison with Egyptologists, implying also that they disagree with the majority of Egyptologists is certainly misleading, slanted, and what I would call evidence of bias on your part. New World Archaeologists would surely never dismiss the wielders of the scientific tools of their profession nor their opinions in such a cavalier fashion.

Lest this letter sound too negative, I want you to know that I write you ( and whoever actually wrote the review ) in the spirit of frankness, but more in hopes that your consciousness might be raised with respect to presumably unconscious biases that you bring to the task of book reviews, rather than to chastise you for presumed transgressions. Please consider my words not as an indictment, but rather as useful feedback, however badly I may have put it.

Sincerely,

Brian Stross ( signed )
Professor