These two fine books treat important questions of race, gender, and celebrity in Europe and the world since about 1870. They are written for different audiences, Holly Grout's chiefly for cultural historians of France, Sebastian Conrad's for a wider public interested in subjects ranging from the history of archaeology to the commercialization of cultural icons. Ancient Egypt features in both books, but chiefly as an archive of symbols and ideas to be repackaged by the moderns in the late imperial age. By limiting her study to three modern and very human figures, Grout is able to tease out the nuances and contradictions of their biographies. Conrad, on the other hand, treats the circulation of an ancient artifact, and as his range is more global, so too are his snapshots necessarily more cursory. Both are good books, in their own way, though Conrad's will be most widely read, and vigorously debated.

Holly Grout's aim is to examine the resonances of a transhistorical fantasy of exceptional womanhood, centering on the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra (69-30 BCE), in the dynamic world of France (really Paris) between about 1870 and 1960. Grout analyzes three female celebrities: Sarah Bernhardt, Colette, and Josephine Baker (all adopted names), arguing that while all three did not literally play Cleopatra in the sense of taking the role on stage, all deployed a sort of "orientalized" sexuality to conjure powerful cultural memories of the Egyptian monarch-temptress.

One of the things that made the historical Cleopatra a celebrity, Grout argues, was her "illegibility", a term I dislike (35). And in fact, Grout shows that Cleopatra was totally legible for her first (malicious) biographer Octavian, who, like Plutarch and Shakespeare after him, personified her as the Orient's sexual threat to Roman power and masculinity. It is true but was not particularly problematic in the ancient and early modern worlds, that her ethnicity was indeterminate. What mattered was that she had been a ruler in her own right, who had bewitched Caesar and destroyed Marc Antony. That her relations with Roman rulers might have had pragmatic reasons, or have been underwritten by her attested intellect, was forgotten; what remained was the frisson, and threat, of oriental sexuality.

Grout is right, I think that Sarah Bernhardt's Cleopatra spoke directly to "the generalized fear of emasculation that plagued bourgeois France in the Third Republic". (93) But her conclusion that this "forced theatergoers to see the ways in which the foreign other was so very much just like us" seems improbable (93). What strikes me is that Bernhardt was able to get audiences (at least in decadent Paris) to appreciate or even revel in the power of sex to destroy civilization. Like that of Wagner and Klimt, her celebrity was built on unleashing the extraordinary id, not convincing French citizens they were just like her.

Neither Baker nor Colette actually played Cleopatra on stage - though comparison to the Egyptian queen was sometimes made by others. Grout establishes Colette's relation to Cleopatra by describing the scandal around a 1907 Moulin Rouge piece titled Rêve de l'Égypte in which Colette engaged in a passionate kiss with the transvestite Marquise de Belbeuf, then known to be her lover. As an "erotic cipher" who occasionally played orientalized roles, she "demonstrated how the Other exists not only in opposition to the self but within the self". (133) Baker, on the other hand, chiefly played on stereotypes of primitive Africans, performing nearly nude, against jungle backdrops, and dressing not like an Egyptian queen but instead as a wild, eroticized "savage". (145) Grout describes her performances, and commercialization of her form of Black beauty well, though her conclusions that she "echoed white women's demands for personal freedom" rests on thin evidence (166).

As all of this suggests, the Cleopatrian thematics are a bit strained here and there, and I am skeptical about Grout's claim that any of these three women were able to convince French audiences that they were "just like us". (178) I doubt very much if this identification worked in la France profonde. But we all know French culture was and is made in Paris. And perhaps Paris has taught us that Europeans and Americans do periodically revel in watching Rome fall.

Sebastian Conrad's Die Königin aims at a wider, even international, and not necessarily scholarly public. His reception history of the bust of Queen Nefertiti (c. 1370-1330 BCE), powerful wife of the proto-monotheist Echnaton and mother of King Tut, begins with a discussion of what we now know about the Egyptian queen, including that she may have been murdered. Conrad deals well (it seems to me as a non-specialist) with the Egyptological material. He also offers a concise but nuanced discussion of the discovery of the bust by a skilled Egyptian excavator working for the German archaeological service in 1913, and the duplicities surrounding the partage (division of finds) agreement that awarded the Germans this special prize.

His presentation of nineteenth-century Egyptology and archaeological rivalries misses out some important factors, such as the enormous interest, in Britain and in Germany, in biblical Egypt. It is this, above all, that made the Egyptians potentially ancestral to the Europeans: Moses was, after all, an Egyptian. But Conrad is generally very good on the ambivalent role played by the modern Egyptians - both endorsing excavations to cement a link to Pharaonic Egypt and the high culture of Europe, and finding themselves financially, legally, and culturally subordinated to European interests.

But the best part of the book, in this reviewer's estimation, are the chapters that deal with Nefertiti's fame after her first exhibition in Berlin in 1924. Conrad does a wonderful job of showing what playing up this universal model of beauty did for the Germans of the 20s (though I might have invoked the stoic, angular slimness that appealed to the art deco designers of the period). He has interesting things to say about the many foiled plans to restitute the iconic statue to Egypt, supported already in the 20s by the Jewish entrepreneur whose funds had paid for her excavation at Amarna, James Simon. But overwhelming public opposition foxed this plan. Goebbels wanted to send her back in 1933, as a propaganda stunt to curry favor with colonial subjects, but Hitler could not bear to part with a masterpiece around which he envisioned building a whole museum.

The West Germans came close to sending the bust to Cairo in 1952, but fears that restitution would result in diplomatic trouble with the East Germans again put plans on hold. In the meantime, the Egyptians took to claiming the queen by other means, founding a short-lived Nefertiti Airlines and putting her iconic picture on the five piaster banknote. Throughout, the argument for retention was both legal and culturally condescending: the partage was legal, the Egyptians would not take proper care of the monument. Of course, the restitution debate continues today, though the Berlin Museums now deploy different arguments, claiming that as an icon of universal beauty, Nefertiti belongs to the world's cultural heritage, and is right at home in a Germany that now truly values diversity.

Most daring are Conrad's chapters about the question of Nefertiti's racial identity, and what this means abroad, especially, but not only, in Egypt and America. He offers original insights about the ways in which Nefertiti was read in the context of decolonization, in China and in India. But he signals the main quarrel already in his introduction, which features the 2011 visit of African-American pop star Beyoncé and Zahi Hawass, long-time director of the Egyptian antiquities service, to the Berlin museums to view the bust together. What the two share is admiration for Nefertiti's beauty. But for Beyoncé, who presented herself as a reincarnation of the Egyptian queen in a 2018 viral video, this is a specifically Black beauty. For Hawass, it is a specifically Egyptian beauty, a symbol of the Egyptian nation which ought not to be appropriated for African American identity politics. As Conrad notes, Zawass's high-profile championing of the ancient bust also papers over ethnic, religious, and political conflicts in Egypt. Conrad does a marvelous job of critically assessing the agendas - political, personal, and commercial - that continue to drive these claims.

Conrad's book will undoubtedly make both sides uncomfortable, which is exactly what a critical history should do. He does not take sides on the restitution question, but seems doubtful that it will happen (only, I think, if the Parthenon Marbles leave London first). But as he has shown, the even greater surprise would be if the argument about the queen one German newspaper called 'the most beautiful inhabitant of Berlin with a migration background' ends anytime soon.

Suzanne L. Marchand