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.
Tea on the terrace takes the reader on a journey up and down the Nile with famous archaeologists and Egyptologists. Spending time with these fascinating men and women at their hotels and on their boats, the book reveals that a great deal of archaeological work took place away from field sites and museums. Arriving in Alexandria, travellers such as Americans Theodore Davis, Emma Andrews and James Breasted, and Britons Wallis Budge, Maggie Benson and Howard Carter moved on to Cairo before heading south for Luxor, the site of the Ancient Egyptian city of Thebes. The book follows them on their journey, listening in on their conversations and observing their activities. Applying insights from social studies of science, it reveals that hotels in particular were crucial spaces for establishing careers, building and strengthening scientific networks, and generating and experimenting with new ideas. Combining archaeological tourism with the history of Egyptology, and drawing on a wide array of archival materials, Tea on the terrace takes the reader behind the scenes of familiar stories, showing Egyptologists’ activities in a whole new light.
In this expansive new biography of George Reisner, Egyptologist Peter Der Manuelian examines the life and work of America's greatest archaeologist. Manuelian presents Reisner's undeniable impact and considers his life within the context of Western colonialism, racism, and nationalism. Pyramids with hidden burial chambers. Colossal royal statues and minuscule gold jewelry. Decorated tomb chapels, temples, settlements, fortresses, ceramics, furniture, stone vessels, and hieroglyphic inscriptions everywhere. This is the legacy of forty-three years of breathtakingly successful excavations at twenty-three different archaeological sites in Egypt and Sudan (ancient Nubia). George Reisner (1867-1942) discovered all this and more during a remarkable career that revolutionized archaeological method in both the Old World and the New. Leading the Harvard University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition, Reisner put American Egyptology on the world stage. His uniquely American success story unfolded despite British control of Egyptian politics, French control of Egyptian antiquities, and an Egyptian yearning for independence, all while his Egyptian teams achieved the fieldwork results and mastered the arts of recording and documentation. Reisner's lifespan covers the birth of modern archaeology. It also intersects powerfully with aspects of colonialism, racism, and nationalism, as Western powers imposed their influence on Egypt and sought to control the Suez Canal during especially the two World Wars. The wholesale export of dynastic Egypt's treasures to museums in London, New York, and Boston also raised issues of repatriation and cultural patrimony long before they became the hot topics they are today. Walking Among Pharaohs, by author and recognized Egyptologist Peter Der Manuelian, gathers unpublished documents from all over the world to present the untold story of one of the founding fathers of modern Egyptology and restore his place in the history of world archaeology, while not overlooking some of his cultural interpretations that may be easily rejected today.
Art and the Historical Film provides an important examination of fine art's impact on filmmaking, grappling with the question of authenticity. From Eugene Delacroix's interpretation of the 1830 French revolution to Uli Edel's version of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, artistic representations of historical subjects are appealing and pervasive. Movies often adapt imagery from art history, including paintings of historical events. Films and art shape the past for us and continue to affect our interpretation of history. While historical films are often argued over for their adherence to "the facts," their real problem is realism: how can the past be convincingly depicted? Realism in the historical film genre is often nourished and given credibility by its use of painterly references. This book examines how art-historical images affect historical films by going beyond period detail and surface design to look at how profound ideas about history are communicated through pictures. Art and the Historical Film: Between Realism and the Sublime is based on case studies that explore the links between art and cinema, including American independent Western Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010), British heritage film Belle (Amma Asante, 2013), and Dutch national epic Admiral (Roel Reiné, 2014). The chapters create immersive worlds that communicate distinct ideas about the past through cinematography, production design, and direction, as the films adapt, reference, and transpose paintings by artists such as Rubens, Albert Bierstadt, and Jacques-Louis David.
A varied and charming collection of 17 papers that bring something new about the people from many countries and backgrounds who traveled to, from and within Egypt and the Near East, either singly or as a group, and explored, observed and recorded, or stayed for a short period of time to improve their health or simply to enjoy the experience. While some travelers kept a diary or journal that has survived until today, others did not. Their travels have to be extracted from the wide range of manuscript sources that are thankfully retained in libraries and archives, or which still remain with their descendants. Sometimes, the name of a traveler is only contained in a few words within a single piece of correspondence or journal entry, yet from such small beginnings and through detective work to link the chance meetings between travelers with a location, or news of a shared event, it is often possible to chart part of a traveler’s journey and bring to life a person who has long been forgotten. These minor characters and their travails often bring a new perspective to well-known places and events.
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 to Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Turkey and the Levant recorded and remembered their journeys by collecting or creating mementos of places they visited. This natural inclination took many guises, ranging from painting landscapes or, later, taking photographs to acquiring souvenirs, very often antiquities. The collection of antiquities, a controversial and usually illegal practice today, was in the 18th and 19th centuries not necessarily either, and many privately assembled collections now form the basis of major national museums. Souvenirs and New Ideas explores the human desire to retain the memory of a foreign journey, in a series of essays that examine the collections of a variety of travellers, from intrepid female solo voyagers to European royalty. Their acquisitions included souvenirs ranging from Egyptian mummies and ancient artefacts, to paintings and sketches of places visited, to the raw material for books written at leisure, both scholarly and popular. In their desire to share with those at home some of what they had seen, these voyagers contributed to an understanding of societies little known at the time, and the stories of their travels continue to entrance.
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.
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