click on Walton's camel for top of pageWorking Papers from ASTENE Conferences
At the Edinburgh Conference in 2001 it was suggested that ASTENE might produce 'Working Papers'. The idea behind 'Working Papers' is to publish papers given at the biennial conference quickly, to assist members interested in the same person or area or topic and benefit the authors by stimulating comment and discussion. Two papers have been produced to discover the degree of interest for this type of publication. Continuation of the series therefore depends upon the response of members. Although this will be shown primarily through sales, our Chairman is happy to receive comments about the series to his address below or to jmwagstaff@yahoo.co.uk The Committee will make the final decision about the future of the series. Comments on the papers themselves can be sent to the authors, whose addresses appear in them. The first two in this series - a research resource in themselves - are now available.
1: The Dancer of Esna by WillIam H. Peck, The Detroit Institute of Arts. The paper drew on eight travellers' accounts of the 'Ghawazee' as they described - or experienced - them. He drew on Edward Lane's published knowledge and the rather more personal accounts of American and European travellers.
2: Daniel Clarke: A Civilian in Egypt, by former Bulletin Editor, Peta Ree, combined the paper she gave with the readings given by Neil Drury in the part of Clarke, at the Cambridge conference. The paper swiftly outlines Clarke's extensive travels from May 1799 until his arrival in Egypt in April 1801. He witnessed the end of the French expedition in Egypt, and the handing over of the Rosetta Stone to the British.
ASTENE Working Papers cost £2.00 each post free in UK; £3.00 each overseas. They can be obtained by sending cash or a cheque made out to ASTENE to: Professor Malcolm Wagstaff, 16 Oakmount Avenue, Highfield, Southampton, Hampshire S017 IDR. They are also available through the American University in Cairo Bookshop.
The New Dictionary of National Biography, 2004
In September next year one of ASTENE researchers' most readily available research resources will be published in both print and on line editions when Oxford University Press after many years of unremitting labour produces the new Oxford DNB. The 60,000 pages are now being proof read, and then one of the largest single works ever to be printed in English will go off to the printers.
But that will not be the end. The remaining team will continue with new research. Frequent updates of the online version will begin in 2005, and continue indefinitely. If you believe you have a person or group of persons who should be considered for inclusion, contact the Oxford DNB through Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford or by e-mail: oxforddnb@oup.com
Several ASTENE members have contributed articles on travellers in Egypt and the Near East - some are new articles, some revised. Women travellers particularly have joined the entries: Sarah BeIzoni, Anne Katherine Elwood, and others.
The ASTENE Research Resources Project
Even those of you who attended the most enjoyable 2003 Oxford Conference may have missed the presentation of our Research Resources Database Project in the crowded and sometimes hectic schedule. The project is now very near completion and we hope to have it available very shortly.
Although published works on travel and travellers in Egypt and the Near East can, with the growing availability of sophisticated online catalogues of major libraries, be traced fairly easily, there are many archival resources in both public and private collections which are not listed or described in such catalogues. Moreover, even within listed collections, items of interest to the study of the travel in Egypt and the Near East are not always identified as such. Additionally, members of ASTENE are regularly discovering relevant materials not yet recorded online, or not hitherto known. Currently these are noted in the ASTENE Bulletin or reported in its conference papers - and this will continue.
The ASTENE Committee identified the need for a searchable, online directory for this information and the Research Resources Project was set up. Unfortunately, despite several time-consuming applications to academic funding bodies, it proved impossible to obtain a grant for what was essentially viewed by funding bodies as an IT project. The provision of such information, often discovered in quite unexpected places, is however regarded by ASTENE as essential for promoting new research. The ASTENE committee therefore decided that the project was important enough to warrant underwriting it themselves, and a pilot database for the ASTENE website is now under construction.
The database will contain the names and dates of travellers and their companions, with the places and dates of travel. It will include fields for biographical information and discoveries, and supply information on the source material: archival, bibliographical, or in any other medium. Variants of names and places will be included. The database which will appear as part of our website, will have a simple quick-search facility. It will be available to ASTENE members only.
We will soon be putting forms on the website to collect material in an easily transferable format, and asking members to contribute information. There will be an editorial board who will process the material before it is transferred to the database. We hope in the near future to be able to provide our membership with a most useful new research facility. News about it will be given in future Bulletins and on our website.
Dr Patricia Usick, Secretary of ASTENE
16 Sept 2003
Index to Research Resources, Bulletins 3-15
Abyssinian Expedition, Bibliography of contemporary
accounts, 15, p. 22
Athens, Greece: Libraries holding travel literature, 14, pp.24-6
Belmore, Earl of, Correspondence and documents, 11, pp. 25-6
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris - some photographic collections, 8. p.21
British and Empire History Writing, Bibliography, Royal Historical Society,
11, p.27
Blackman, Winifred, papers at School of Archaeology and Oriental Studies, University
of Liverpool, 9, p.22
British Library, 7, p.20
British Museum Central Archives, 5, p. 13-15
Egyptian Antiquities, Department of, Archives, British Museum, 5, p. 15-16
Cairo, Egypt, Nine libraries and institutions holding material relating to travellers,
8, p.22
Calendar of Travellers in Egypt and the Near East, 29 January-September 18 18,
Cambridge University Library, 4, pp.20-21
Church Missionary Society Archive, University of Birmingham, 11, p.27
Corvey Travel Archive, Sheffield Hallam University, 7, p.20
De Famas Testas, Willem: diaries, letters, drawings, Dutch National Museum (RMO),
Leiden, 3. p.20
Egypt Study Circle (postal history), 3, p. 5
Ethiopian Studies, Institute of, Addis Ababa, 15, p.23
Family Records Centre, London: births, deaths, marriages, censuses, 6, p. 19
Freer, Charles Lang, collections at Freer Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 9,
p.22
French women travellers, Bibliography of 19-20th centuries, 3, pp. 10-14
Gentleman's Magazine, The, 3, p4
Getty Research Library, Los Angeles, 11, p.28
Gfiffith Institute Archive, 5, p. 17; 13, p. 11
Gfiffith Institute/Sackler Library, 12, p.29
Hay, Robert, drawings British Library, 9, p.20
Hilmy, Prince, The Literature of Egypt & Soudan, earliest Times, to 1887,
5, p.20
International Genealogical Index (IGI), 5, p. 19
Italian biographies, two indices, 7, p.20
Lepsius, Richard, journals, Berlin Museum & Griffiths Institute, 9, p.23
Linant de Bellefonds, Louis, inss, Bibliotheque Centrale du Louvre, 5, p. 18
Malta: Government Gazette, 13, p.34;
National Archives, 13, p.35; National Library, 13, p.34
Malta Penny Magazine, 13, p.34
Melik Society, The, 10, p.28
National Library of Scotland, 12. p.29
National Register of Archives, 6, p. 18
National Trust - connections with travellers, 11, p.25-6
Palestine Exploration Fund, 7, p.21
Photography of Egypt 19th century, 3, p. 15-19 article mentioning: Academie
Royale de Beaux Arts, Brussels; Allard Pierson Museum, Amsterdam (Bocke-Cadbury
Archive); Bibliotheque Nationale Paris (Jarrot Archive); Egyptological Prints
Archive, Berte, Belgium; Heidelberg University (H.W.Muller Archive); University
of Geneva (Nagel Archive); St Antony's College, Oxford University.
Pillet, Maurice, Egyptian papers/photographs, Centre de Researches Archeologiques,
Valbonne, 9, p.22
Public Record Office, London Architectural Drawings, 3, p.5: Foreign Office
papers, 6, p. 17: Records of Army and Royal Navy Officers, 6, p.17: Photographs,
British Empire and Foreign Office, 6, p. 17
Record Repositories in Great Britain, edited lan Mortimer, PRO 1997),
6, p. 17
Royal Society, The Raymond and Beverley Sackler Archive Resource: a database
of Fellows, 8, p.23
St Anthony's College ' Oxford University: private papers collection, 5, p. 18
Searight Collection, Prints & Drawings Dept., Victoria & Albert Museum,
5, p. 19
Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies, Cambridge, 7, p.21
Sudan Archive, Durham University Library, 15, p.23
Thomas Cook Archives, 5, p. 17
Who was Who in Egyptology (Egypt Exploration Society, 1995), 5, p.20
Wills in England, 6, p. 19
Witt Photographic Library, 5, p. 19
Preparedfor the Bulletin by Peta Ree
16 Sept 2003
The ASTENE Bulletin carries advertising in the Autumn and Spring issues. It has a world-wide membership of some 250 people and organisations and is sent to these members in 20 countries.
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We maintain a website and suitable advertisements can be inserted. Consult ASTENE office for prices. Camera ready copy should be sent to the ASTENE office by 1 March for Spring, and 15 August for Autumn. An invoice will be sent on receipt, to be paid before publication. A copy of the Bulletin will be sent to the advertiser.
Flyers (produced and printed by the advertiser) should be notified
to the ASTENE office well before these dates and delivered by the advertiser
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How Many Miles to Babylon? Travels and Adventures to Egypt and Beyond from 1300 to 1640. by Anne Wolff, 3 11 pages, illustrated, Liverpool University Press, 2003, ISBN (hardback) 0-85323-658-5 £37.99; ISBN (paperback) 0-85323-668-2, £11.50.
Many ASTENE members work with 19th century travellers. Anne Wolff has gone back to travellers (many of them merchants) who laid the foundations of European travel to the East. Before them, of course, were the Greeks and the Romans (whom later travellers with a classical education often relied upon for basic knowledge), the great Arab scholar-travellers and pilgrims and Crusade-linked travellers.
Mrs Wolff has delved deep into these travellers' accounts, reflected on her reading, sensitively digested the material and written a fascinating book. The experiences of the two dozen travellers from Italy, Crete, Germany Austria and England include such old familiars as the delightful Fra Felix Fabri of Ulm, harassed Nicolo di Poggibonsi and noble Pietro dalla Valle, but there are many less known who wrote of the towns and country of Egypt as they once were - and, in small parts, can still be. Her travellers are not the people the later travellers had read, but often, being of necessity closer to the people, gave insights that later travellers could not provide.
Even if it took months to get there, the pilgrimage often became something of an adventure holiday, away from the daily routines, and enthusiastic descriptions of the pilgrims' journeys in the form of travelogues were produced for the edification of those back home. The prescribed tour of Egypt and Sinai was laid out before them, something to be perused beforehand, a forerunner to the modern travel brochure.
Mrs Wolff has melded and contrasted the experience of these early travellers in ten chapters looking at governance, imagination and reality, Alexandria, the Nile journey, Cairo, the Pyramids and the Mummy Fields, pilgrimage, and travel to Upper Egypt.
How Many Miles to Babylon? has frequent useful and entertaining illustrations, and is both a valuable research resource and a very good read.
Deborah Manley
The Diaries of Lorenzo Warriner Pease, 1834-1839, An American Missionary in Cyprus & his Travels in the Holy Land, Asia Minor and Greece, edited by Dr Rita Severis, 2 vols, pp. 1100, 186 b/w illustrations, Ashgate, 2003. £150, ISBN 0 7546 3561 9
This work is a monumental contribution to the literature of historical travel, and it fills a significant lacuna in our knowledge of lives of travellers in the first half of the 19th century in Cyprus and the Near East more generally. Pease's 11 diaries of the period, held in manuscript form in the Union Theological Seminary, New York, are carefully transcribed and reproduced in a splendid and accessible format. The volumes are lavishly illustrated with mainly contemporary illustrations, and all of Pease's original sketches from the diaries have been faithfully included. The work opens with a thorough and erudite contextual introduction and carefully researched explanatory footnotes throughout; it also includes a wide-ranging bibliography which shows painstaking care and attention to detail by the editor. Six appendices of extra primary material and four comprehensive indices leave no stone unturned in the search through Pease's useful documentation.
Pease was an American Presbyterian missionary to Cyprus who left Boston for the mission field in 1834, and spent the rest of his life there. An avid diarist, his voluminous recording of all that he saw and met and struggled with in Cyprus and the Holy Land and surrounding territories is an immense repository of precious detail and circumstance for the researcher. Everything is included, from Pease's rigorous climatic observations to his dismay at breaking his spectacles (p. 392). This richness of detail will delight many an archive burnished historian and will provide much material for the contextual embodiment of Pease's ideas. The text is sympathetically dealt with and processed, and the volumes are produced to a high standard.
Dr Severis is to be congratulated upon bringing this primary source to the attention of a wide audience of researchers and readers, whose use of this valuable edition will undoubtedly bear much prime scholarship in years to come.
Edwin James Aiken, School of Geography, The Queen's University of Belfast
The Gates of Africa: Death, Discovery and the Search for Timbuktu by Anthony Sattin, Harper Collins, 2003, pp.273, Illustrations and maps, ISBN 0 00 7122330
This book is about the work of the African Association (1788-1831) in promoting the exploration of the then largely unknown interior of Africa and the search for the fabled city of Timbuktu (Tombouctou in Mali). Although the adventures of two of the Association's explorers, Mungo Park and Jean Louis Burckhardt. are well known, Sattin's lively narrative not only summarises their exploits (three and two chapters respectively) but also outlines the contributions of lesser known men such as Major Daniel Houghton and Frederick Hornemann in opening up the interior and of Captain Gordon Laing, who actually reached Timbuktu but was murdered as he began his journey out. Adventure and exploration, however, are put in the wide context of London's scientific and political society, the moves to abolish the slave trade, African politics and Anglo-French commercial and political rivalry.
The African Association was a private society, basically a dining club, and its work was funded from subscriptions. Members included aristocrats, politicians and civil servants, several of whom were leading opponents of the slave trade. Sattin shows how their wealth, ambitions, connections and geographical ideas shaped the strategy of British African exploration, while the limits of the Association's finances virtually confined their efforts to the one-man expedition.
The dominant figure was Sir Joseph Banks, the great panjandrum of British science in the period, and his role is clearly brought out. John Barrow, Secretary to the Admiralty, emerges later as a director of more official, larger scale exploration. The surveyor and cartographer, Major James Rennell, was scarcely less important than Banks for he tried to make sense of ancient and medieval accounts of the interior of Africa and reconcile them with the often imprecise information from more recent sources, including the African Association's own employees.
Rivalries between African states and the distrust of their rulers for Europeans are shown to have handicapped and thwarted the explorers' efforts, while the struggle between Britain and France for hegemony is revealed as driving the search for viable routes into the interior, especially from the west African coast.
Sattin's tale is one of amateurs, pitched against natural and human forces, barely comprehended, of adventure and intrigue. It is 'a good read'. Sattin has based his work squarely on the travellers' own accounts, where possible, but he owes a large debt to the work of Robin Hallett in publishing the Records of the African Association (1964) and producing his own account of The Penetration qfAfrica (1965).
Inevitably I have some quibbles. The distances are immense (Timbuktu is over 900 miles in a straight line from the mouth of the Gambia River, more than 1500 mi les from Tripoli and over 2500 miles from Cairo), and more might have been made of this fundamental fact. I would also have welcomed more of the author's own impressions of some of the places in Africa key to the Association's work, for he has clearly been to them. Reference might have been made to the Hanoverian basis for the 'Gottingen Connection', which was instrumental in getting the University's students (Hornemann and Burckhardt) into the employ of the African Association. William Richard Hamilton and Colonel Leake, influential figures in the African Association towards its end, and long- standing friends, both had experience of Egypt and had been beyond the First Cataract; this was surely a factor not only in their involvement in the African Association but also in their view of how operations should beconducted.
Malcolm Wagstaff
Voyage aux Mines d'Or du Pharaon, compose de L'Etbaye, Pays habité par les Arabes Bicharieh: géographie, ethnologie, mines d'or [a new edition] by Linant de Bellefonds Bey, 13 illustrations, map and photograph; 276 pp., Editions Fata Morgan, Montpellier, 2002 ISBN 2.85194.577.7
Containing Entre Nil et Mer Rouge [avant propos] par Jean-Claude Goyon; Un homme d'action du XIXe siecle [preface] par Michel Kurz. and also Le paysage botanique de I'Etbaye by Jean-Claude Goyon, Les cartes de Linant de Bellefonds by Michel Kurz, five maps, notes, a biographical chronology, a bibliography, and a 16-page insert printed with a photograph of Linant in Egyptian uniform and reproduction of the 13 original drawings from the first edition.
Linant de Bellefonds was one of those nineteenth century personalities whose energy, enterprise, intelligence, level of culture, and practical skills put the present day to shame. When he arrived in Egypt he was just eighteen and the pioneering era of Egyptology had only just begun, - a golden age for travel and exploration. During the next dozen adventurous years he took part in at least eight important expeditions and made the acquaintance of nearly every important figure in early Egyptology, including Forbin, Laborde, Bankes, Salt, BeIzoni, Drovetti, Ricci, Champollion, Lane, Lord Prudhoe, and the whole circle round Gardner Wilkinson. These early travels were brilliantly summarised by Marcel Kurz and Pascale Linant de Bellefonds in an article published through ASTENE in Travellers in Egypt (1998).
In 1830 Linant entered the service of Muhammad Ali as a hydraulic engineer. Under Muhammad Ali he became Chief of Works for Upper Egypt, then Director of Public Works. Under Said he was made Director General, and under Khedive Ismail he became Minister of Public Works and a member of the Privy Council. He retired from Egyptian governmental service in 1869; became a Pasha in 1873, and died in Cairo ten years later.
One of Linant's first commissions under Muhammad Ali was to conduct two expeditions in the Nubian desert: the first (1831) to survey the ancient mine workings he himself had seen during his earlier travels in the Dongola Bend; the second (1832) to explore the rest of the Atbal and the slopes of Gabal 'Alba, homeland of the untamed Ababda and Bisharin, and the only part of Egypt watered by monsoon. His companion on these two trips was none other than Joseph Bonomi, whose renditions of what they saw still await complete publication.
Linant's accounts of these two expeditions remained unpublished until some time after 1862 (probably 1869), but is nevertheless one of the classic and most frequently cited texts of desert travel. It was summarised by Marcel Kurz and Pascale Liniant de Bellefonds in ASTENE's Desert Travellers (2000) whlch also contains Janet Starkey's article Gold, Emeralds and the Unknown Ababda, dealing with the same region, - but it has never been reprinted.
The new edition of L'Etbaye, Pays habité par les Arabes Bicharieh is thus enormously valuable, and is a worthy companion to Pétra retrouvée, Voyage de Pétrée, 1826, published in 1994. The preliminary essays and other editorial additions are especially welcome. Among the many treasures of the text itself, I would point out the eight pages on camels (pp. 247-255) and a whole series of isolated remarks that bear the stamp of informed experience.
John Rodenbeck
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: A major original source that cites Linant
and is frequently overlooked is Ludwig Keimer's wonderful Notes prises chez
les Bisharin et Nubians d'Assouan, Bulletin de I'Institut de I'Egypte, XXXII
(Cairo: IFAO, 1951-54), 49-101; XXXIII, 43-136, XXXIV, 329-449, XXV, 447-533.
Egypt through the Eyes of Travellers, edited by Nadia EI Kholy and Paul Starkey
The last of the trilogy of books from the Cambridge Conference is available. it contains papers on travellers to Egypt who were missionaries, Egyptologists, novelists and painters from the Enlightenment onwards - all offer their own perspectives.
This and the other two titles are available from the Museum Bookshop, 36 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3QB (with a discount for ASTENE members) or from any good bookseller.
Desert Travellers from Herodotus to T.E. Lawrence, ISBN 0-9539700-0-0;
Travellers in the Levant: Voyagers and Visionaries, ISBN 09539700-1-9;
Egypt through the Eyes of Travellers, ISBN 0-9539700-2-7. Each £19.95,
but £17.50 to-members.
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