Serapis — Volume 05

Georg Moritz EbersProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

3.6

Word count: 109K words
Chapters: 11

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.Serapis — Volume 05 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

This is Volume 5 of Serapis, a long historical novel by the German writer Georg Ebers, released as a public-domain eBook by Project Gutenberg. Ebers is known for meticulously researched historical novels set in ancient Egypt, and this volume continues the novel's unfolding of religious and social conflict in Alexandria during the Roman Empire, with the characters' fates gradually tightening by the end of the volume. As a volume of a larger work, its value lies mainly in its connection with the preceding and following volumes; read on its own, it feels unresolved, with insufficient explanation of characters and relationships. It suits readers who have finished the first four volumes and wish to proceed volume by volume, or scholars studying the reception history of nineteenth-century German historical fiction who need it as a textual excerpt. The electronic edition is an English translation, cleanly typeset and easy to search, suitable for comparative reading and excerpting on screen or e-reader. For an overall grasp of the story, choosing the complete edition is more efficient.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers who have finished the first four volumes of Serapis and need to continue the plot
Literature students studying historical fiction set in ancient Egypt and Ebers's work
Researchers who need a public-domain English text for textual analysis or corpus work
Readers accustomed to reading by volume who like to annotate and excerpt on electronic devices

Not a good fit for

General readers who have not read the first four volumes and want to start with this volume
Readers who want the complete story in one go and prefer not to read in installments
Readers uninterested in the religious background of ancient Egypt and the Roman period

Reading tips

Finish the first four volumes before starting this one, to avoid breaks in character relationships and event threads.
Note characters and religious factions as you read, for cross-volume reference.
Read alongside the complete edition to confirm this volume's place in the whole.
After each chapter, review the volume's opening plot to trace the rhythm of the conflict.

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

Can I read this volume without having read the previous ones?

Not advisable. This is the fifth part of a long novel; character relationships and conflicts are fully developed in the first four volumes, and reading it alone means encountering much unexplained background and suspended plot, making it hard to follow. To understand the story, start from the beginning of the complete edition.

Is this book in English or German?

According to Project Gutenberg, the book is marked as English, an English-translation eBook, classified under Germanic, Scandinavian, and Icelandic literatures. The original is Ebers's German historical novel, so note the translation's wording as you read.

Does the volume edition differ in content from the complete edition?

The volume edition presents the complete long novel split into volumes; the content itself does not form an independent story, and Volume 5 is part of the whole. The complete edition provides all chapters at once, convenient for continuous reading and overall grasp; the difference lies mainly in how you read, not in rewritten text.

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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.