The portrait of David Roberts (1796-1864), dressed as for his eastern journeys, by Robert Scott Lauder in 1843 is well known to visitors to the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

Portraits of the Travellers - where are they?

Do you know the whereabouts of any portrait of travellers to our region? Please let us know the place, the painter and the date. Coming face to face with a traveller - as one does with Claudius Rich at the British Library - brings them much closer.

Thomas Phillips "caught as no other the noble gloom of the romantic pose and the inspired intensity of the creative imagination." (Boase) The phrase probably refers rather more to Phillips highly romantic 1813 portrait of Lord Byron in the National Portrait Gallery, London, than to his representation of the charming open countenance of Claudius James Rich in the India and Asia Library in the British Library.

The artists who clearly felt a an affection for their sitter are William Holman Hunt in his 1857 chalk drawing of Edward Lear (1812-1888) in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, and Richard James Lane in his 1833 sculptured seated figure of his brother, Edward William Lane (1801- 1876) In the National Portrait Gallery. London. Much less well known is E.W. Lane's self-portrait of c. 1826 in sepia wash, which is hidden away in the British Library in Add Ms 34088, f.85.

T.E Lawrence (1888-1935) , painted by Herbert Gurschner in 1934, is in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Very 1930s, and rather noncommittal about the sitter - but perhaps that is the way Lawrence preferred it.

Thomas Wyse (1791-1862), painted by John Partridge in 1846, also in the National Portrait Gallery of Ireland, is a sympathetic portrait, showing a kindly, intelligent man looking surprisingly young for his 55 years.

The portrait of Thomas Shaw (1694-1751) hanging in St Edmund's Hall, Oxford, is described as showing "a stout and fierce, but not ill-tempered looking man".
And a portrait that has vanished. In about 1815, John James Halls painted Henry Salt just before he left for Egypt, the basis for the engraving in Halls' biography of his friend. As late as 1828 it was hanging in Halls' studio, and, since he treasured it, it was probably still in his possession at his death in 1853. It is not mentioned in his will, which simply left everything to his wife Maria. Is there somewhere, in a provincial gallery, an attic, or an antique shop, a portrait of 'An unknown man' of rather solemn and distinguished appearance, holding a manuscript in his hand?

Peta Ree
November 07

Family history seekers
The great international search for family history - aided by websites and quick messages sometimes produces queries about the ASTENE region. One such ancestor seeker, in Illinois, struck gold…
His, as he put it, g-g-g-grandfather was Reverend Robert Fowler Holt (1792-1870), chaplain to the 2nd Earl of Belmore and tutor to his two sons when the Belmores toured the Eastern Mediterranean in 1817 - while their home, Castle Coole in County Fermanagh in Northwen Ireland was being reconstructed and modernised. He had found reference to my paper on this tour given at the ASTENE Oxford Conference in 1997. From this he had read about Henry Salt and found Dr Robert Richardson's narrative of Lord Belmore's travels, in two volumes, 1822.

Then he emailed me and I passed him on to Peter Marson, author of the Belmore's family history, published this year. Mr Marson was able to give the g-g-g-grandson more detail than he was likely to have been able to find himself. Another source of information was Who was Who in Egyptology edited by Warren R. Dawson and Eric P. Uphill and updated by Morris Bierbrier, published by The Egypt Exploration Society in 1994.

Do we have other examples of travellers' descendants doing family history research being aided through ASTENE connections? Are there people researching members of their families who travelled in the ASTENE region who members might help?

November 07

Architects and Archaeologists Discover Egypt and the Near East, edited by Diane Fortenberry, ASTENE and Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2007, 197 pp, ill., ISBN 9781842172735, £45.00.

The first thing to say is that this book, which commemorates the first ten years of ASTENE, is the most handsome and attractive of the volumes so far produced by the Association, and then to congratulate Diane Fortenberry and Oxbow Books. It is a lavish production. Wide outer margins set off the single column text and contain thumbnails of the 25 coloured plates collected at the back. There are also numerous black-and-white full or half-page illustrations throughout. The dust jacket reproduces a painting by F.A. Bridgman in full-colour, while the endpapers carry a David Roberts lithograph. The content is good too! The fourteen contributors write beautifully and knowledgeably on the broad theme of the responses of mainly European architects, painters and craftsmen, several with clear archaeological interests, to the cultures and scenes of the Near East and Egypt over a period of four centuries. Eight of the contributors deal with the travels and researches of individuals, some well-known like Sir Robert Ker Porter and Charles Barry but others less so - Muhammad Sadiq, for example, an Egyptian Muslim and professional engineer. However, there are exceptions to the focus on individuals. Rita Severis and Caroline Williams discuss the work of groups of artists and the ways in which they reacted to the landscapes of Cyprus and Egypt respectively, while in two contributions Elaine Evans shows how photography not only produced 'truer' images of the enigmatic Sphinx but also promoted a popular interest in ancient Egypt through the stereoscope. Another exceptional contribution describes the arrival in Cairo of two German travelling journeymen stonemasons in their distinctive clothing and their work on the new Sam Ibn Nub mosque supervised by the author, Agnieszka Dobrowolska. Finally, the book contains an impression of Henry Salt's house near the Ezbekiah in Cairo, compiled by Deborah Manley from the descriptions left by some of the many travellers who stayed when Salt was Consul General (1816-27) and even beyond. With such a variety of material, the book is a delight for the mind as well as the eye. It is rich in informative and a useful reference, a quality assisted by the index of persons and places.

Malcolm Wagstaff
November 07

The Rash Adventurer: a Life of John Pendlebury, by Imogen Grundon with Foreword by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Libri, Oxford, 2007, 320 pp, ISBN 9781901965063, £25.00

As John Pendlebury is not included in the new DNB, this biography fills a much needed gap.

To summarize his importance: he was a young and dynamic field archaeologist widely active in Egypt and in Crete between the late 1920s until his death at the hands of the German forces during the invasion of Crete in 1941. Imogen Grundon has done a magnificent job in portraying John as a whole: athlete, traveller, archaeologist, inteliigence officer as well as "too bloody independent minded for his own good". When she undertook the task, which she did (I was told by mutual friends) instead of a PhD, she faced a mountain of source material as both John himself and his wife Hilda corresponded regularly and vividly with their families in England. Because of the bulk of material, she has used a strictly chronological approach, though illuminated with telling comment. She obviously came to know her subject very well and has managed to tame the sources into a coherent narrative.

I am less sure of what the readership will be; it is not a reference book but a straight biography told in a somewhat pedantic manner and certainly not a fashionable one. For someone like myself who actually knew John when I was a child and was made to play with his son, and knew of him throughout my life, it is fascinating to fill in the gaps and meet old friends. John had much impressed my father (Alan Wace) during his first trip to Greece as a student and my father became one of his mentors, writing too the Aegean archaeology section of his obituary in the Annual of the British School at Athens. The assessment there of his publications on Crete remains true today some sixty years later though his first work, Aegyptiaca, is currently being thoroughly brought up to date by ASTENE member Dr Jacke Phillips.

Libri are to be congratulated on having persisted with this book which complements their re-issued related titles (by Dilys Powell and Mary Chubb - both sources for Imogen) which are listed at the end of the book. I am less happy with the illustration on the dust-cover - surely there must be a picture of John in his Cretan dress somewhere in the archives - but it can at least be removed. There are some errors, both of fact and in the proof reading; the dramatis personae though useful is very uneven particularly where both it and the text refer back to the earlier history of the characters of the British School. However they are under study by others.

So read and enjoy what now seems a quite different world inhabited perhaps by men of over life size but do not treat this book as a source in itself.

Lisa French
November 07

Travel, geography and culture in ancient Greece, Egypt and the Near East, edited by Colin Adams and Jim Roy, Leicester Nottingham Studies in Ancient Society, vol. 10, Oxbow, Oxford, 2007, 208 pp, ISBN 9781842172490. £40.00
Perhaps there are two things within the remit of ASTENE that many of us often neglect in our researches: travel from Egypt and the Near East and travel in times of antiquity. Nevertheless, our researches may now be spurred, as the editors of this volume remind us that 'In recent years there has been a considerable amount of research into travel, travel writing and geography in the ancient world.' (p.l).

This notable volume is a collection of papers delivered at a conference in Nottingham in 2002 that all of us probably wish we had attended. Eleven papers range in topic from Late Period Egyptians Abroad to Travel in the Greek Novels to Representations of Landscape and Identity in the Mosaics of Antioch. The scope however is not the only impressive feature of this anthology: the papers are richly researched and deftly written. The volume is clearly and pleasantly illustrated where necessary, and, as ever, handsomely produced by our friends at Oxbow. As a nice touch that I for one appreciate, each chapter has its own bibliography and the volume as a whole is usefully and rigorously indexed.

Hopefully the synergy of ideas here wilf inspire us all to broaden our research horizons.

Writing, Travel and Empire: in the Margins of Anthropology edited by Peter Hulme and Russell McDougall, I. B. Tauris, London, 2007, 248 pp, ISBN 9781845113049. £42.50 We are all familiar with the fraught and often unsatisfactory nature of disciplinary histories. This volumes grapples, capably, with the history of anthropology from about 1850 - 1940. Its approach is unusual and rewarding: eight servants (in some sense) of the British empire are considered as travel writers and as anthropologists. Their writings, as the subtitle suggests, have been thought, for one reason or another, to be on the margins of where anthropology has traditionally drawn its disciplinary boundaries, and the editors of this collection argue ably that this is where their value lies; such a boundary-focussed approach certainly resonates with me as a geographer, and I can immediately see the value of a geography of anthropology alongside a history, complimenting and contrasting with each other.

The eight figures are George Grey, Henry Ling Roth, Fiora Annie Steel, Everard im Thurm, Gertrude Lowthian Bell, Hugh Clifford, Roger Casement and John Harrisson. They form a geographically and historically diverse group, and their analysis, by a range of internationally recognized scholars, is introduced and followed by rich scholarly pieces setting the studies within the contexts of the intellectual history of anthropology and, in the conclusion, blending their findings with the incisive and insightful thought that we have come to expect of Professor Peter Pels.

Edwin James Aiken
November 07

To The Heart of the Nile by Pat Shipman, Corgi, London, 2005, 470 pp, ISBN 9780552771009. £8.99
Having previously read Anne Baker's absorbing book Morning Star, which is Florence Baker's account of the expedition to put down the slave trade on the Nile in 1870 - 73, I was looking forward to learning a good dea! more about this extraordinary woman from Pat Shipman's biography. To write this she has had access to the Baker family and a wealth of fascinating material including Florence's own diaries, and those of Samuel and Julian Baker, as well as numerous letters, journals and other manuscripts of the period.
At this point I feel I should alert potential readers to the author's decision to attribute 'thoughts and words to Florence and the people in her life that are in keeping with their characters and recorded words.' By choosing to dramatise her material in such a way I fear she may have undermined her authority as Florence's biographer. However, time spent reading the endnotes is time well spent and will allow a reader to evaluate the credibility of the author's dramatisations; incidentally some of the resulting dialogue can sometimes be irritatingly clumsy.

In spite of this however, this book provides an enthralling account of Samuel and Florence's life together and their two expeditions into the dark interior of nineteenth century Africa. It charts their great love for each other and their indomitable will to overcome not only disease, treacherous wildlife, hostile natives and extreme deprivation, but also the grumbling disapproval of Victorian Society.

Some of the material will be familiar to members of ASTENE and the fictional feel of the writing might be off putting to some. However to those who are tempted by the prospect of a gripping story about two remarkable people, then this is the book to read.

Note-The first edition of this book was entitled The Stolen Woman. (Bantam Press, 2004)

Angela Reid
November 07

A Conversation on the Quai Voltaire by Lee Langley, Vintage, London, 2007, 384 pp, ISBN 9780099492924. £7.99.
In her latest novel, A Conversation on the Quai Voltaire, Lee Langley reconstructs the life of Dominique-Vivant De Non, a member of the eighteenth century French aristocracy, who dabbles in art, politics and love. Like Tracy Chevalier in her depiction of Vermeer in Girl With a Pearl Earring, Langley paints in the colourless gaps between the works of an artist, filling them with sketches of cities such as Venice and St. Petersburg as well as the lives of Denon's acquaintances. However, Langley casts her net wider, and more ambitiously, than Chevalier taking in the whole scope of Denon's life from his childhood in Burgundy to his decrepitude in Paris.

This novel is however not simply a biography, but a work built on and examining layers of tension between master and servant, revolutionaries and the aristocracy, past and present, age and youth.

It is this final conflict that is perhaps the most interesting; the mingling of narrative time allows the vibrant colour and activity of Denon's youth to be contrasted with the stagnation of his old age which forms the present time of the novel. Thus a 'shiver of mortality' (p. 50) vibrates through the novel, facilitating the revelation of what may have lain behind the carefully-crafted appearances which characters such as Napoleon, Madame La Pompadour and Denon himself have presented to society and history.

In this well-researched depiction of an artist, Langley focuses on Denon's humanity as he struggles to reconcile the conflicts that fill his life while negotiating the delicate webs of society, life and love.

Amy Finch
November 07

The Sphinx Revealed: A Forgotten Record of Pioneering Excavations by Patricia Usick and Deborah Manley (British Museum Research Publication no. 164), London, 2007, 80 pp, ISBN 9780861591640. £25.00.
In 2002, following the relocation of the library and the archives of the Egyptian Department at the British Museum, ASTENE founder members Patricia Usick and Deborah Manley discovered a 105-page handwritten Memoir on Pyramids and Sphinx text with an Atlas of illustrations by Henry Salt. The two volumes had never been completely published, although partial versions had appeared during the Nineteenth Century in three publications, most notably the Quarterly Review of July 1818.

The Memoir is actually written in several different hands, expertly identified by the present authors, with Salt's marginal notes referring to the Atlas, It contains what Usick and Manley aptly refer to as the "dramatic account" of the excavations at Giza by Captain Giovanni Caviglia (1770-1845) in 1817, including the first clearance of the Sphinx in modern times. We encounter, for example, "Capt. C." negotiating his self-made rope ladder to enter the room directly above the King's Gallery in the Great Pyramid, the fioor of which was "covered eighteen inches deep with the faeces of bats".

The Atlas contains Salt's competent drawings, including plans, and copies of reliefs and inscriptions. Most famous is his careful copy of the famous 'Dream Stela' of Tuthmosis IV where, as the authors acknowledge, Salt's inability to read the hieroglyphic inscriptions became "both their strength and their weakness".

Usick and Manley relate how these papers, after long delays, reached London in 1821, and became the property of Salt's patron Lord Mountnorris, After his death they were sold and acquired by the British Museum. The authors go on to discuss some objects described and drawn by Salt, before presenting a list of the 68 drawings and sketches in the Atlas. It is significant that 40 are here published - the reproduction quality is excellent - for the very first time.

Following the plates, on pp. 56-69, there is a transcription of Salt's Memoir; finally, on pp. 70-71, a copy and a transcription of Burckhardt's manuscript extract from al Idrissi's history of the pyramids.

The book concludes with indexes -including a valuable biographical list of persons mentioned in the text, an identification of mausoleums and tombs mentioned by Salt, a list of objects from Caviglia's excavations now in the British Museum and a bibliography.

Significantly, the aforementioned Quarterly Review had made an editorial cut to Salt's acknowledgement of his "Mussulman" predecessors at Giza. We can now read this paragraph in full: 'The Arab authors of best repute, have recounted even the details of their discovery, and every circumstance, under the presenl aspecl of the pyramid, serves as a confirmation of their veracily". These are heartening words to the present reviewer who is now attempting to redress the blatant Euro-centric approach to the rediscovery of Egyptology within her own teaching.

While the present publication is clearly a valuable addition to our knowledge of the history of Egyptology, it also adds some essential details to our understanding of the Sphinx and the pyramids. Moreover, the authors' intimate grasp of characters and events provides a scholarly 'Sitz in Leben', enabling us to flesh out the bare bones of an earlier pioneering era.

Rosalind Janssen
November 07

Egypt through Writers' Eyes by Deborah Manley and Sahar Abdel-Hakim, London: Eland, 2007, ISBN 978-09550 1056-9, £12.99
Ah, but which writers? Do we want to share their experiences? Never fear! This collection provides the sideways glance, the unexpected view of the traveller in Egypt. Even arrival in Alexandria is seen in a different way - not as the usual dockside melee. And it is not all travellers, and not all Europeans. We are taken through the souks of Cairo by a blind Egyptian boy, who sniffs and feels his way, through an alarming world.

We start with the mythological beginnings of Egypt, admit terror at being handed up a pyramid, hardly daring to look at the view from the top. We experience the small joys on an excavation, and pride in useful building works. The impact of modern political problems on families and friends are revealed. Each extract is provided with an explanatory heading, which leads the reader on, with the feeling "I must read this one" … and on you go, unable to stop.

Sometimes a familiar name comes up, but that person often appears in an unexpected light. Several of the extracts are from Egyptian writers such as Amin Malouf, Taha Hussein, Ahdaf Soueif, and Ahmed Hassanein - whose concerns are so different from those of the fleeting traveller. That the travellers are long-time residents, such as E.M Forster and Penelope Lively, are British, reflects the interests of the authors, and reduces the need for translation, - other than from Arabic, Pierre Loti is the one exception.

Our guides range from the medieval geographers, Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Battuta, to the modern historian Max Rodenbeck. All the extracts chosen add something to our experience of Egypt. The divisions are geographical: Alexandria, Cairo, Sinai, Upper Egypt etc, but this is not a travelogue. It is a mosaic of impressions from different times and from people of varied background and expectations: a revealing and thoroughly enjoyable and informative read. Alix Wilkinson

The views expressed in reviews are not necessarily those of the Editor, the Book Review Editor or ASTENE.

Alix Wilkinson
November 07

OTHER BOOKS ETC.

Holy Land Explorers
Dr Jacke Phillips drew our attention to this book by Erik Olaf Eriksen published in 1989 by the Franciscan Printing Press, Jerusalem. It relates the travels of Christopher Costigin: Explorer of the Dead Sea; John Nicolayson: Man of Unity and rescuer of Costigin; Lt. Molyneux: British Explorers of the Dead Sea; Lt William Lynch: American Explorer of the Dead Sea; Henry Tristram: The Canon's Expedition to the Dead Sea; Robert Boggis: Jordan Rover Pilgrim; Lt. James Ferguson: Jordan River Canoeist; Lawrence Oliphant: Journey East of the Jordan River; Elizabeth Butler: Holy Land Artist; Prayer of an Explorer in the Holy Land; Land Travellers Observations on the Jordan River and Dead Sea, 1850; The French Exploration of the Holy Land; The Dead Sea Today.

This sounds a fascinating starting point for ASTENE researchers.

Joseph Banks: Man of the Enlightenment
At £585 Neil Chambers The Scientific Correspondence of Joseph Banks (6 volumes, Pickering and Chatto) may be a snip if Banks is your man. For ASTENE members his main interesting correspondence will be on his work with the African Association - and here this book - if your research library buys it - could be very rewarding.

November 07

TRAVELLERS IN FICTION
Ann Revell has been re-reading Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit and discovered two surprising references to travellers to Egypt. We welcome such unexpected findings from other books.
Ann writes: At the beginning of the book the scene is set in Marseilles where an ill-assorted group of travellers is presented. Among them is the Meagles family. He is a retired bank-man with a weak daughter on whose behalf he has undertaken two trips.

Chapter One: Then her mother and I were not young when we married and Pet has always had a grown up sort of life with us, though we have tried to adapt ourselves to her. We have been advised more than once when she has been a little ailing, to change climate and air for her as often as we could … This is how you found us staring at the Nile, and the Pyramids, and the Sphinxes, and the Desert, and all the rest of it; and this is how Tattycoram will be a greater traveller in course of time than Captain Cook.

Chapter Two: He crossed by St Paul's and went down at a long angle almost to the water's edge. … Passing now the mouldy hall of some Worshipful Company, and now the illuminated window of a Congregational Church, that seemed to be waiting for some adventurous Belzoni to dig it out and discover its history.

November 07

WHERE ARE THEY BURIED?

We welcome contributions to this section which might include queries. Please send your contribution to the Bulletin Editor.

MEMORIAL PLAQUES
When travellers died abroad their death is often marked by a memorial plaque in a church or cathedral rather than by their grave. I always pass my eyes along the such plaques as I did recently in Winchester Cathedral. This plaque on the north wall says more about the Crimean War than it can about this young traveller.

John Tweddell (1769-1799)
Bulletin 32 had a query about the last resting place in Athens of the traveller John Tweddell). Dr Lisa French went on a search and, thanks to her colleague, Professor John Camp (Director of the Agora Excavations), referred us to a deeply researched and fascinating article from the American Excavation in the Athenian Agora, Hesperia: Supplement V (1941) by the great American classical architect, William Bell Dinsmoor. (Swets & Zeitlinger, Amsterdam, 1975) entitled "Observations on the Hephasteion" (pp. 16-30) (available on Jstore).

We cannot of course reproduce the article here and it covers many other travellers', as well as John Tweddell's, resting place. For our purposes we provide a few points which will be of interest to readers of what was referred to by Hughes in 1820 as "that great mausoleum of British travellers".

The earliest British names recorded include those of "Gyles Eastcourt, Fran. Vernon, Barn, Randolph, 1675 An" with details of their deaths - including murder on the way from Trebizond to Persia. No firm evidence of interments appears until John Tweddell's on 25 July 1799, when Fauvel arranged for him to be interred in the 'Theseum'. His grave was, E.D. Clarke reported when he visited it on October 30, 1801, "simply a small oblong of earth, like those over the common graves in all our English churchyards, without stone or inscription of any kind". John Hobhouse in the winter of 1809/10 also found just a simple mound. The epitaphs which started the query thus came later.

Dinsmoor's article is worth following up as it brings together travellers and their associates from the 'infamous' Lord Elgin, the artist Lusieri. Reverend Robert Walpole, Byron, Cockerell, Fauvel, and others, and touches on stone taken from the Parthenon frieze blocks used for an inscription.. The site was visited and remarked upon by such travellers as Pouqueville (1815), Joliffe (1817), Laurent and Kinnard (1818). By 1827 the inscription seems to have disappeared, but much later fragments appeared and may be seen today in the wall of the English church, the Agora museum store, and the Epigraphic Museum (under the National Museum in Athens). If you decide to follow this trail, do first read Dinsmoor's article.

Two further recordings of burials: Beside Tweddell was interred the Austrian Baron Carl Haller von Hallerstein (died 5 November, 1817). The article also reminds us of the funeral in 1818 of Elizabeth Cumming, the female attendant and companion of Lady Ruthven - thus drawing to our attention another traveller…

The 'Theseum' or Hephaistein can easily be visited in the Athenian Agora (joint ticket with the Heropolis) and St Paul's Church is open on Sunday and Tuesday mornings.

Here we can go no further into the detail of Dinsmoor's article, but it shows what fascinating knowledge can surround a traveller's tomb, and how much it can tell us about travellers in a particular place. We welcome contributions on this topic.

Reverend Greville Chester (1830-1892)
Gertrud Seidmann presented a paper on Greville Chester at the ASTENE conference. She now supplies this information of his burial place.

Reverend Greville Chester is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, London W10. The number of his grave is 33299.
Chester was ordained in 1855 and served a slum parish in Sheffield until 1865 when his health broke down. He henceforth spent the winter months in Egypt and the Near east. There he sought out ancient artefacts and became an astute collector of coins, seals, gems, amulets, textiles and other objects. These he sold or gave to the British and the Ashmolean Museums. He contributed many articles to the Archaeological Journal.

November 07

Lieutenant Arthur Francis Maine - who having been mercifully preserved at the Battles of Alma and Inkerman died in the camp of the Light Division before Sebastopol, on the 21st day pf November, 1854 of dysentery and fever brought on by exposure in the trenches - in the 23rd year of his age.

Anthony Charles Harris (1790-1869) and Selina Harris (c. 1827-1890)
Gottfried Hamernik has recently been studying the Anthony C. Harris manuscripts kept in the library of the Graeco-Roman Museum of Alexandria and some of the graves and monuments in the British Protestant Cemetery near the demolished Rosetta Gate in Alexandria, and sent photographs of the Harrises' tomb.

Harris was a British merchant in Alexandria and commissariat official (with a duty of providing food, stores and transport to the military). Apart from his mercantile activities, Harris was a collector of and dealer in antiquities (including papyri). He formed a significant collection which he gave to Seline, his natural daughter by an 'African' lady. He died on 23 November 1869.

Selina was educated in England, but, when possible, was her father's constant companion. After his death she may have had financial difficulties and part of the collection was acquired from her by the British Museum in 1872. She died at Ramla in Alexandria on 18 March 1899 and is interred with her father.

The residue of the Harris collection was left to Waynman Dixon (1844-1930). Dixon was a civil engineer from Newcastle-on-Tyne. He was associated with Benjamin Baker in the transportation of 'Cleopatra's Needle' (the fallen obelisk at Alexandria given to the British government by Pasha Mehmet Ali, which now stands by the Thames in London). While in Egypt in 1872 he also explored at the Pyramids and discovered the air passages from the 'Queen's Chamber'. He died in Great Ayton in Yorkshire on 24.1.1930.*

The grave of Anthony Harris and his daughter Selina. Photograph Gottfried Hamernik.

Florence Nightingale met the Harrises in Cairo on her return from Nubia in 1850 and is one of the few people who left a personal record of them:

The next day we sat at home, we were weary, and the H------s came to wish us goodbye, and to see my sacred Ibis, and compare it with the ancient sculptures - they had never seen one, it has become so rare. Mr Harris is now the best antiquarian in Egypt, and his daughter is very learned too. I was very sorry to part; she is almost the only person I can talk to about Egypt - we "understand each other". **

(References:* Morris Bierbrier, Who was Who in Egyptology, Egypt Exploration Society, 3rd edition revised, 1995. ** Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile 1849-50 (page 185) by Florence Nightingale edited and introduced by Anthony
Sattin, Barrie and Jenkins, London, 1987)

John Tweddell (1769-1799)
Tweddell was a most promising scholar who, after graduating from Cambridge, wished to become a 'diplomatist'. For this purpose he set out in 1795 to travel to the East to study "the manners and institutions" of the countries through which he passed. He kept minutely detailed journals of all he learned - but these journals are lost. While engaged in archaeological works at Athens (including with the help of the French artist Preaux, "copying every temple, every archway … every stone, every inscription." ) he died of fever on 25 July 1799. He was buried, at his own request, in the Theseum or Temple of Theseus in Athens. His burial is recorded in E.D. Clarke's Travels (1810-23). In 1810 Byron and others arranged that "the spot be marked with a block of marble that had been cut from the bas reliefs of the Parthenon" with a Greek inscription written by Reverend Robert Walpole. Many memorials were composed in his honour.

(References: R. Tweddell, Remains of John Tweddell, 1815; DNB 1917, XIX 1312; DNB 2004, vol. 55)
Can this burial place and marking stone still be seen?

Mark Sykes (1880 - 1919)
Sykes was a senior diplomat in negotiations for the future of the Ottoman Empire and its Arab lands, where he was widely travelled. In 1919 he died of 'Spanish' flu while attending the Versailles peace conference. His body was sealed in a lead coffin to be returned to his estate in Yorkshire. He was buried nearby in the churchyard of St Mary's at Sledmere.

Now, ninety years after his death, this traveller's remains are to be disinterred for evidence they may provide of the avian virus which is similar to the present feared H5N1 virus. His well preserved body could give insights into the mechanism by which bird flu kills. (Source: Guardian, 28 February, 2007, p.9)

August 07

FOOTPRINTS

Memphis is no more
George Sandys (1578-1644), son of an Archbishop of York, was like John Smith (see Bulletin 32) a traveller both in America and the Ottoman empire.

A city, great and populous, adorned with a world of antiquities! But why spend time about that that is not, the very ruins now almost ruinated? Yet some new impressions are left, and diverse thrown down statues of monstrous resemblances; a scarce sufficient testimony to show unto the curious seeker that there it hath been, Why then deplore our human frailty?

"When stones as well as breath
And names do suffer breath."

A Rainy Day in Athens, 1841
Hans Christian Anderson, the beloved Danish teller of tales, visited the Mediterranean and Black Sea.Here, from his book, A Poet's Bazaar, re-issued by Michael Kessend, New York in 1987, is an intriguing tale from a day in Athens.

The rain was falling in large drops and soon there was a downpour. Three different flocks of sheep stood in the narrow square in front of the church, they huddled together, closer and closer. The shepherds lent on their long staffs. Closely wrapped in thick brown smocks, with their shapeless hats pulled over their heads, they looked more like Greenlanders than what we think of as Greeks. They stood bare-legged in the mud. The rain poured down and eased off only towards evening, when the wind broke up the clouds and scattered them away like mist.

I ventured out. Creeping out from their low mud-huts were a couple of Negro families, who had been slaves under the Turks. The woman's entire costume consisted of a sort of gown and a soiled skirt. She lay and scooped out water over the doorstep, while small black children, one wearing nothing but a red wool shirt, danced in the mud.

The Egyptian Transit Administration
At the ASTENE Conference we were introduced to the P & O archives. Here is an excerpt from a pamphlet entitled History of the P. & O. Company's Connection with Egypt - with no author or date. This excerpt is dated 1854.

The P & O Company found there was a deficiency of hotel accommodation at Cairo for passengers in transit circumstance, that during the season which the India passengers selected for travelling by the "Overland Route", Cairo was frequented by a large number of Tourists, etc, travelling in Egypt. The latter class took apartments and lodged at the hotels for weeks or months, and were consequently more profitable customers to the hotel-keepers than the India passengers, who seldom required more than a night's lodging and a meal. Hence the hotel-keepers naturally gave a preference to the most profitable customers, and the India passengers found difficulty in obtaining comfortable accommodation.

In order to provide a remedy for this inconvenience, the Directors made an arrangement for fitting up a large house, near the Shoubra Gate, and close to the junction of the Cairo and Alexandria Railway with the road to Boulac. This house was called the "Transit Hotel", and was almost exclusively devoted to the accommodation of passengers to and from India, etc., and this was found to remedy much of the discomfort hitherto complained of.

Does any reader know of travellers' experiences of the Transit Hotel? - or perhaps know the later history of this large house?

November 07

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