Arachne — Volume 02

Georg Moritz EbersProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

3.5

Word count: 92K words
Chapters: 10

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Arachne — Volume 02 by Georg EbersAuthor: Ebers, Georg, 1837-1898,Language: English, Class: PT: Language and Literatures: Germanic, Scandinavian, and Icelandic literatures, Release Date: Apr 1, 2004

Editor's review

Arachne — Volume 02 is the second volume of Georg Ebers's historical novel Arachne, released as a public-domain English ebook by Project Gutenberg. Ebers, known for his background in Egyptology, often wove ancient city life, religious belief, and personal fate together in his fiction, and Arachne follows the same approach. This volume sits in the middle of the work, advancing relationships and conflicts; read on its own it can feel fragmented, so it suits readers who have finished Volume 01 and want to continue the story. As a free electronic text, its advantage is easy full-text search, excerpting, and comparison across editions; its limitation is the lack of modern editorial notes and a Chinese translation. While reading, note how the narrative uses ancient settings to discuss art, faith, and identity, and treat it as a sample of nineteenth-century English translation of a German historical novel, observing how the translator handles ancient names and religious terms.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers who have finished Arachne Volume 01 and want to follow the plot further
Those interested in novels about ancient Mediterranean city life and religion
Scholars studying English translations of Ebers and public-domain electronic texts
Readers who enjoy slow, long reads and taking notes on character relationships

Not a good fit for

Readers who have not read Volume 01 and want to start here
Casual readers who prefer self-contained, tightly paced stories
Beginners who need a Chinese translation or detailed historical notes

Reading tips

Review the characters and main threads of Volume 01 before starting this volume to reduce the sense of broken threads.
Mark recurring images and character relationships while reading to grasp the middle-section structure.
Read consecutive volumes from Project Gutenberg together to keep the narrative continuous.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Is this volume the same work as Serapis?

No. Arachne and Serapis are two different historical novels by Ebers, each released in volumes. This volume is the second part of the Arachne series, with characters and setting different from Serapis; do not confuse the two series.

Why does this volume feel incomplete?

Because it is a volume-based electronic edition of a long novel, covering only part of the whole work. Project Gutenberg releases it by volume, and a single volume is not a self-contained story; the plot continues across volumes, so reading them in order is recommended.

How difficult is the English, and is it suitable for learning English?

The text is an English translation of a nineteenth-century German novel, with long sentences and many ancient names and religious terms; it is not easy reading. For English study, a solid reading foundation plus a dictionary and background materials is advisable; focus on the narrative language rather than word-by-word reading.

Comments

Find this book

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Georg Moritz Ebers Author · German · 1837–1898

Georg Ebers (1837–1898) was a German Egyptologist and novelist. Born in Berlin in 1837, he served as a professor at the University of Leipzig. His major contribution to Egyptology was the discovery, editing, and publication of the famous Ebers Papyrus, which provided valuable material for the study of ancient medical texts. At the same time, he devoted himself to spreading Egyptological knowledge through literature, writing historical novels such as An Egyptian Princess and Uarda. These works weave the social life and historical settings of ancient Egypt into their narratives, making specialized scholarship more accessible to general readers. His works number 172 in the library's collection, including the serialized volumes of An Egyptian Princess and Cleopatra, which shows how widely his historical novels circulated. Overall, Ebers combined scholarly rigor with a novelist's gift for popular expression, occupying a distinctive place in the popularization of Egyptology in the nineteenth century.