Lost And Now Found Explorers Diplomats And Artists In Egypt And The Near East

Long distance travel and mass tourism are not recent phenomena. Papers from the 2015 ASTENE Conference in Exeter demonstrate that over the centuries many individuals and groups of people have left the safety of their family home and travelled huge distances both for adventure and to learn more about other peoples and places.

Early travellers in Egypt and the Near East made great contributions to our historical and geographical knowledge and gave us a better understanding of the different peoples, languages and religions of the region. Travellers in this volume are a mixture of rich and poor, bravely adventuring into the unknown, not knowing if would ever return home.

This volume 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.

This splendidly illustrated book focuses on the botanical legacy of many parts of the former Ottoman Empire — including present-day Turkey, the Levant, Egypt, the Balkans, and the Arabian Peninsula — as seen and described by travellers both from within and from outside the region.

Elements from Ancient Egypt have been present in Croatia ever since Antiquity. 'Egypt in Croatia' considers artefacts discovered in present-day Croatia, 16th-20th century travellers, Egyptian collections and early collectors (1820s-1950s), the development of Egyptology as a field of study as well as the various elements of ‘Egyptomania’.

Beautifully designed, the book interweaves text with lavish colour illustrations, many being the exquisitely detailed drawings and paintings made by artists and travellers recording their journey. Here, on a scale unmatched by any other modern publication and including many unfamiliar images, are hieroglyphics, wall paintings and mummies, portraits of both the explorers and the Egyptian people and scenes highlighting the magnificence of the great temples and the pyramids. Cairo had seen European soldiers and merchants since the Middle Ages, but of the great achievements of the ancient Egyptians only the pyramids were known. Gradually over the next 300 years, travellers ventured further, but the most exciting discoveries were made by Napoleon and his soldiers whilst on a military campaign. It was then that the marvels of ancient Egyptian civilization were truly rediscovered. Napoleon’s scientists documented all the great monuments in the Nile Valley, transforming what had been a military defeat into an extraordinary cultural triumph that greatly influenced European art, architecture and culture.

A tight-knit group closely linked by intermarriage as well as class and old school ties, the “Arabists” were men and women who spent much of their lives living and working in the Arab world as diplomats, military attaches, intelligence agents, scholar-adventurers, and teachers. As such, the Arabists exerted considerable influence both as career diplomats and as bureaucrats within the State Department from the early nineteenth century to the present. But over time, as this work shows, the group increasingly lost touch with a rapidly changing American society, growing both more insular and headstrong and showing a marked tendency to assert the Arab point of view. Drawing on interviews, memoirs, and other official and private sources, Kaplan reconstructs the 100-year history of the Arabist elite, demonstrating their profound influence on American attitudes toward the Middle East, and tracing their decline as an influx of ethnic and regional specialists has transformed the State Department and challenged the power of the old elite.