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

Paul Starkey, Janet Starkey, Paul Starkey, Janet Starkey

• Publisher: Archaeopress
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781789697520
• eBook ISBN: 9781789697537
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

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

• Cover
• ASTENE Publications
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents Page
• Introduction
• 1
• Pilgrimage as travel
• 2
• Ibn Jubayr’s Riḥla reconsidered
• 3
• ‘Gardens of Paradise’
• 4
• ‘Wady Ghrásheca’:
• an unknown Christian site in Sir Gardner Wilkinson’s unpublished manuscripts from the Eastern Desert
• 5
• Exploring the Ottoman Empire:
• the travels of Peter Mundy (1597–c.1667) in Turkey 1617–1620
• 6
• With a radius most accurately divided into 10,000 parts: John Greaves and his scientific survey of Egypt in 1638–1639
• John Greaves and his scientific survey of Egypt in 1638–1639
• 7
• Dimitrie Cantemir,
• the ‘Orpheus of the Turkish Empire’ (1673–1723)
• 8
• The artist William Page (1794–1872)
• and his travels in Greece and western Turkey in the first half of the nineteenth century
• 9
• Jacob Röser:
• a Bavarian physician travelling the Ottoman Empire in 1834–1835
• 10
• Publishing with ‘Modern Taste and Spirit’:
• competitiveness and commercialism in a mid-nineteenth-century British illustrated travel book on modern Egypt
• 11
• ‘Mr and Mrs Smith of England’:
• a tour to Petra and east of Jordan in 1865
• 12
• Anton Prokesch-Osten Jr (1837–1919)
• 13
• William Wing Loring, George Brinton McClellan and Ulysses S. Grant: American Civil War generals in Egypt during the 1870s
• American Civil War Generals in Egypt during the 1870s
• 14
• Consular agents and foreign travellers in Upper Egypt
• in the nineteenth century
• 15
• A Luxor Room with a View at Pagnon’s Hotels
• 16
• Richard A. Bermann, the Desert and the Mahdi:
• an Austrian writer’s fascination with Egypt and the Sudan
• 17
• Unlawful acts and supernatural curses:
• the fictional traveller in Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903)
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Back cover