RESEARCH RESOURCES

• ROYAL ALBERT MEMORIAL MUSEUM, EXETER (II)
• THE HOPE PORTRAIT COLLECTION, ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM, OXFORD
• NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY
• GRAFFITI ON THE INTERNET
• Documents on Line P. Ree
• Online British Library Catalogue
• RIBA AND THE V & A
• ASTENE JOURNAL PROJECT UP-DATE
• A NEW WEBSITE: travellersinegypt.org
• THE CLASSICAL JOURNAL 1810-29
• GRAVESTONES AND MEMORIAL

BOOKS & REVIEWS

• Gertrude Bell by H.V.F.Winstone, Barzan Publishing, 504 pp., 28 pp. b/w photographs, h/b £19.95, 2004, ISBN 0954772806.
• The Contribution of Early Travel Narratives to the Historical Geography of Greece by Malcolm Wagstaff; The 22nd J.L. Myers Lecture, Oxford University Press, 2004 15 pp, 0-9546647-0-1, £5.00
• Pierre Loti: Travels with the Legendary Romantic by Lesley Blanch, Introduction by Philip Mansel, Tauris Parke, 340 pp., p/b £12.99, ISBN 1 85043 429 8, reprint of 1983 edition.
• Shumaisi by Turki al-Hamad (translated by Paul Starkey), 246 pp., Saqi, £9.99.
• Mapping the Silk Road and Beyond: 2000 years of Exploring the East by Kenneth Nebenzahl, Phaidon Press, 176 pp., 80 colour plates, 5 b/w., h/b £29.95, 2004, ISBN 0714844098.
  
  

ALCHEMY AND HIEROGLYPHS
Those of us lucky enough to have been introduced to the Arabic scholar-travellers by Dr Okasha El Daly at ASTENE conferences will be greatly interested by his conclusion that a 9th century Baghdadi alchemist, Ibn Wahshiyah, had cracked the secret of the hieroglyphs. Comparing his work with the list of signs in Sir Alan Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar (1927), Okasha realised "Ibn Wahshiyah understood perfectly well the nature of Egyptian hieroglyphs". For a decade he has been questioning whether Moslems/Arabs were seriously interested in the study of ancient Egypt. "The result," he writes, "was beyond my expectations." His book The Missing Millenium: Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings is due to be published by UCL Press. A chapter by Okasha appeared in The Wisdom of Egypt: changing visions through the ages in the series 'Encounters with Ancient Egypt', UCL Press, 2003.

NEW DNB
The new Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, September, 2004) is a good source for graves and memorials - and of course a most amazing new research resource. Most British central libraries have invested in it.
About a dozen of the contributors are ASTENE members and have up-dated or created articles on many travellers, from William Bedwell to Osman, from Anne Katherine Elwood to Valentine Baker, from Thomas Shaw to Nathaniel Pearce; from Edward Lane to W.G. Palgrave.