Arachne

Alexandria under the first Ptolemies: a sculptor takes a girl of Tennis as his model for Arachne, the mortal who challenged a goddess at the loom and was punished for winning. Ebers was an Egyptologist who wrote fiction to pay for excavations; this late novel is about art and hubris, and the weaving, the guilds and the harbour are all reconstructed from what he had personally dug up.