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Alfred Butler wrote this 1884 two-volume book as the result of a seven-month field work in Egypt during which he was a private tutor to Prince Tawfik from 1880 to 1881. Karel Innemie of Leiden University wrote “Butler visited most of the old churches and monasteries in and around Cairo and traveled to the Wadi al-Natrun, the monasteries of the Red Sea and a number of churches in Upper Egypt. His descriptions are invaluable and sometimes are the only record of what we know about a certain object or church. It is an important document for its time and an early and influential example of unprejudiced scholarly interest for the culture of the Coptic Church.” Although the author expressed a lot of admiration to our Coptic church and tried his best “to write in unsectarian spirit”, reader has to be aware that he made some wrong comments about the monophysite controversy and the Coptic Church and  used  some words like “legend” of saints instead of “story” or “life” of saints, among other things. Also, in some instances, he seemed to look down at the knowledge of the Copts and their theologians of their history and doctrine at that time. I like to end this book review by couple of wonderful quotes from the book preface. He writes,