Georg Ebers

Georg Ebers was a professional Egyptologist who turned his scholarship into fiction and reached an audience no monograph could. He acquired, in Luxor in 1873, the medical papyrus that still bears his name, one of the oldest surviving medical texts in the world. His novels reconstruct the ancient world with an archaeologist's furniture and a novelist's plots, and they were enormously popular across Europe in translation. The genre came to be called the professor's novel, not always kindly; but the detail is sound, and readers who came to Egypt through Ebers stayed. Illness forced him out of fieldwork in his forties, and he wrote the later books largely by dictation.