Trivia / The Egypt Game

• Write What You Know: In the introduction, Zilpha Keatley Snyder describes how when she was a 5th grader, she had an ancient Egypt phase. Hers was a solo affair, but she read everything she could get her hands on, and made up her own hieroglyphic alphabet. Years later, her daughter had her own ancient Egypt phase in 6th grade.
  Her game was much more complicated than mine and involved many of the activities I described in the story, including the mummification of our parakeet, who, like Elizabeth’s Prince Pete-ho-tep, died by feline assassination.
• Write Who You Know: In the introduction, Zilpha Keatley Snyder says:
  A somewhat shorter root goes back to when I was teaching in Berkeley, California, while my husband was in graduate school. My classes usually consisted of American kids of all races, as well as a few whose parents were graduate students from other countries. All six of the main characters in The Egypt Game are based, loosely but with ethnic accuracy, on people who were in my class one year—even Marshall, whom I had to imagine backward in time to four years of age.