"Utterances that are Strange"

NEVER TO DIE--Josephine Mayer and Tom Prideaux--Viking ($3.50)

Nearest thing in the world to the architecture of ancient Egypt is the clean-sloping, massive 20th-century dam. Nearest thing to Egyptian stone-carving is the work of modern sculptors who feel that if they could surpass its life-loaded repose they would touch the summit of their art. Appreciation of such forms is not purely abstract. Through the imaginations of writers as diverse as Emil Ludwig and Thomas Mann, the civilized life of the Nile has begun to intrigue common thought as Classic Greece intrigued it for centuries. In Never to Die, a neat, lucid book on Egyptian art and Egyptian writings, a little more dust is shined off the dynasties.

Compiled by Teachers Josephine Mayer and Tom Prideaux of Manhattan's progressive Lincoln School, Never to Die owes its material to the labors of several generations of archeologists and translators, principally University of Chicago's late, great Professor James H. Breasted. Unique merit of the book is not in its outline of Egyptian history or its use of Egyptian art but in its presentation of the limpidly human chronicles, hymns, love poems, adages, medical prescriptions and fairy tales which make up the world's oldest written literature. A proverb: "If thou art a guest at the table of one who is greater than thou, take what he may offer thee as it is set before thee. Fix thy gaze at what is before thee, and pierce not thy host with many glances, for it is an abomination to force thy notice upon him. . . ." From a hymn to the Nile: "Praise to thee, O Nile, that issuest forth from the earth and comest to nourish the dwellers in Egypt. Secret of movement, a darkness in the daytime. . . . When he arises earth rejoices and all men are glad; every jaw laughs and every tooth is uncovered." From a poet 20 centuries before Christ: ."Would I had phrases that are not known, utterances that are strange, in new language that hath not been used, free from repetition, not an utterance which hath grown stale, which men of old have spoken."

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