Philosophy

Empirical tests on three children under ten produced identical results: almost instantaneous sleep. Saul Field's embossed engravings in colour are the best thing in the book, especially "L'Arbre des songes" and "Le Violon magique." The last book is not really a book at all. Seven Montreal Artists may be no. I in the MIT Visual Arts Series, but is in fact the catalogue of a show which went from the Hayden Gallery at MIT to the Washington Gallery of Modem Art last year. The painters are Molinari, Barbeau, Tousignant, Goguen, Kiyooka, Hurtubise, and Juneau, which immediately raises the question of the strange absence of Yves Gaucher, considered by most informed observers outside Quebec to be perhaps the most important figure to COme out of French Canada since the days of Borduas and Riopelle. The essays are short and for the most part rather flatulent, but the one on Tousignant is quite exceptionally good: it is the best thing on this painter I have ever read. It may be that on this occasion the mathematical interest of the painter's self-imposed task persuaded the critic to write about what is actually happening in the work, instead of reaching for far-fetched analogies with other art forms and modes of expression. It should happen more often. (ANTHONY EMERY) PHILOSOPHY In the seventeenth century B.G Egypt suffered one of the most traumatic shocks she was ever to receive in the five millennia of her recorded history. In the second quarter of that century a family of Asiatic rulers succeeded in establishing their dominion over the Delta of the Nile and approximately one hundred miles of the river valley to the immediate south. The Egyptians called the foreigners "mw, a term reserved by them for West-semitic speaking peoples of the Levant; the rulers themselves were called "foreign chiefs," or in Egyptian hk'w /!;'swt. By the third century B.G when the historian Manetho wrote his history of Egypt, the "Hyksos," as the term had appeared in Greek, had become a misty horde of barbarians, earthly agents of the wrath of god. Jewish apologists such as Josephus saw in the Hyksos the ancestors of the Hebrews, and connected their conquest of Egypt with the descent of Jacob recorded in Gen. 46. This role the Hyksos had come to play in the Judeo-Christian tradition accounts in no small measure for the impetus given modem scholarly research on the subject. Currently the Hyksos are the topic of debate among ancient historians. The main problem is the almost complete absence of contemporary 410 LEITERS IN CANADA texts, and the inevitable recourse to later tradition. For example, nearly all modem studies of the Hyksos still use as their starting point the lengthy quotation of Manetho which Josephus includes in his Contra Apilmem. The work under review here (The Hyksos: A New Investigation , Yale University Press 1966, $6.50), the outgrowth of a Yale doctoral dissertation, represents the first attempt in thirty years to gather together the scattered bits of evidence, both inscriptional and archaeological. The author, J. Van Seters, is a graduate of the University of Toronto and is well qualified for the task, having been trained in Egyptian history and language and in Palestinian archaeology (the latter a sine qua n