THE WORLD'S DESIRE

by H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang




To

W. B. RICHMOND, A.R.A.



PREFACE

The period in which the story of _The World's Desire_ is cast, was a
period when, as Miss Braddon remarks of the age of the Plantagenets,
"anything might happen." Recent discoveries, mainly by Dr. Schliemann
and Mr. Flinders Petrie, have shown that there really was much
intercourse between Heroic Greece, the Greece of the Achaeans, and the
Egypt of the Ramessids. This connection, rumoured of in Greek legends,
is attested by Egyptian relics found in the graves of Mycenae, and by
very ancient Levantine pottery, found in contemporary sites in Egypt.
Homer himself shows us Odysseus telling a feigned, but obviously not
improbable, tale of an Achaean raid on Egypt. Meanwhile the sojourn of
the Israelites, with their Exodus from the land of bondage, though not
yet found to be recorded on the Egyptian monuments, was probably part of
the great contemporary stir among the peoples. These events, which are
only known through Hebrew texts, must have worn a very different aspect
in the eyes of Egyptians, and of pre-historic Achaean observers, hostile