Pious Pilgrims, Discerning Travellers, Curious Tourists: Changing Patterns of Travel to the Middle East from Medieval to Modern Times

Pious Pilgrims, Discerning Travellers, Curious Tourists: Changing patterns of travel to the Middle East from medieval to modern times comprises a varied collection of seventeen papers presented at the biennial conference of the Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near East (ASTENE) held in York in July 2019, which together will provide the reader with a fascinating introduction to travel in and to the Middle East over more than a thousand years.

As in previous ASTENE volumes, the material presented ranges widely, from Ancient Egyptian sites through medieval pilgrims to tourists and other travellers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The papers embody a number of different traditions, including not only actual but also fictional travel experiences, as well as pilgrimage or missionary narratives reflecting quests for spiritual wisdom as well as geographical knowledge. They also reflect the shifting political and cultural relations between Europe and the Near and Middle East, and between the different religions of the area, as seen and described by travellers both from within and from outside the region over the centuries. The men and women travellers discussed travelled for a wide variety of reasons — religious, commercial, military, diplomatic, or sometimes even just for a holiday! — but whatever their primary motivations, they were almost always also inspired by a sense of curiosity about peoples and places less familiar than their own. By recording their experiences, whether in words or in art, they have greatly contributed to our understanding of what has shaped the world we live in. As Ibn Battuta, one of the greatest of medieval Arab travellers, wrote: ‘Travelling — it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller!’

Table of Contents

Introduction – Paul and Janet Starkey

1. Pilgrimage as Travel – Jacke Phillips

2. Ibn Jubayr’s Riḥla Reconsidered – Paul Starkey

3. ‘Gardens of Paradise’ – Janet Starkey

4. ‘Wady Ghrásheca’: an unknown Christian site in Sir Gardner Wilkinson’s unpublished manuscripts from the Eastern Desert – Jan Ciglenečki & Blaž Zabel

5. Exploring the Ottoman Empire: the travels of Peter Mundy (1597–c.1667) in Turkey 1617–1620 – Jennifer Scarce

6. With a radius most accurately divided into 10,000 parts: John Greaves and his scientific survey of Egypt in 1638–1639 – Ronald E. Zitterkopf

7. Dimitrie Cantemir, the ‘Orpheus of the Turkish Empire’ (1673– 1723) – Cristina Erck

8. The Artist William Page (1794–1872) and his travels in Greece and western Turkey in the first half of the nineteenth century – Brian J. Taylor

9. Jacob Röser: a Bavarian physician travelling the Ottoman Empire in 1834–1835 – Joachim Gierlichs

10. Publishing with ‘Modern Taste and Spirit’ – Paulina Banas

11. ‘Mr and Mrs Smith of England’: a tour to Petra and east of Jordan in 1865 – David Kennedy

12. Anton Prokesch-Osten Jr (1837–1919) – Angela Blaschek

13. William Wing Loring, George Brinton McClellan and Ulysses S. Grant: American Civil War Generals in Egypt during the 1870s – Mladen Tomorad

14. Consular Agents and Foreign Travellers in Upper Egypt in the Nineteenth Century – Terence Walz

15. A Luxor Room with a View at Pagnon’s Hotels – Sylvie Weens

16. Richard A. Bermann, the Desert and the Mahdi: an Austrian writer’s fascination with Egypt and the Sudan – Ernst Czerny

17. Unlawful Acts and Supernatural Curses: the fictional traveller in Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) – Rebecca Bruce

Notes on Contributors

Index

Paul Starkey, MA, DPhil, is Emeritus Professor at Durham University and Chair of ASTENE. A specialist on Arabic literature and culture, he is Chairman of the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature and until 2018 was Vice-President of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES). Janet Starkey, MA (Hons), M.Phil., PhD, lives in the Scottish Borders. A former lecturer on the Anthropology of the Middle East at Durham University and a founder member of the Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near East (ASTENE), she edited the Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies between 2007 and 2018.