ABSTRACT
The wider context of mysterious lands' reveals the workings of unmistakable curiosity in the human spirit. Ancient Egypt is itself a somewhat mysterious land for the modern European, posing its own problems of representation and translation in academic discourse. The association of deities with places recalls Australian totemism, where each clan is associated with a semi-human, semi-animal ancestor whose travels and stopping places bestow rights to land on the ancestors' human descendants. Ancient ritual landscapes depicted or described on Egyptian coffins share some common features with elements of modern cartographic design. Gombrich's discussion of style and representation in art parallels Foucault's account of discourse in literature. Herodotus has been accused of fabricating Egyptian and Scythian society through a series of inversions upon the Greek society he was familiar with. In the history of European fiction, the complexity of an organized geography tends to replace the magic topography of the traditional tale rooted in oral tradition.
