Close encounters
Egyptian Encounters, Cairo Papers in Social Science, Cairo: AUC Press, Volume 23, Number 3, 2003. pp171
Egyptian Encounters is a collection of eight essays which together comprise Volume 23, Number 3 of Cairo Papers in Social Science, published by the American University in Cairo (AUC).
Editor Jason Thompson, associate professor of history at AUC, has gathered scholars who are specialists in their field. Here they write on a fascinating group of subjects, all of whom shared the experience of an encounter with a country which, in those days, was a long way from home.
It is hard to fault this small volume, which provides fascinating vignettes of places and personalities. Thompson writes in his introduction: "So great has been the production of Egyptian travelogues that reviewers felt justified in complaining about their numbers as early as the 1820s." The trickle of European visitors which began to arrive in Egypt in the 16th century "swelled into a river in the following centuries, so much so that it seemed to inundate the land with tourists". Some of these visitors, like Dorothy Brooke, who founded the Brooke Hospital for Animals in the 1930s, left a permanent mark. Others, like Sophia Lane Poole and Jehan d'Ivray, made observations which are now invaluable. Yet other records have become lionised out of all proportion, as John Rodenbeck reminds us. Egyptian Encounters were as many and varied as the travellers themselves.
In her essay "The Brooke Hospital for Animals in Egypt" historian and Middle East expert Sarah Searight writes about her grandmother Dorothy Brooke, who came to Egypt in 1930 to discover the fate of war horses brought from Britain and Australia -- among them 20,000 "Walers" from New South Wales -- to fight with the allied Cavalry in World War I. The horses had been left behind when the war ended in 1918, many sold to local farmers. She searched for old war horses, easily recognisable by their distinctive brand, and purchased them from their owners with a sum equal to a replacement which she was able to do through donations collected in the United Kingdom. The hospital now has several branches for the care of working horses and donkeys in Egypt as well as in Petra in Jordan, India and Pakistan. More recently it sent four mobile clinics to aid refugees in Afghanistan.
Jehan d'Ivray, a recorder rather than a campaigner, left a rather different legacy. John David Ragan describes how, after arriving in Alexandria in 1879 as the "frightened, homesick" teenage bride of an Egyptian medical student, she lived for a time in the hareem of his family in Cairo where she learnt Turkish and Arabic and had a crash course in Egyptian ways. She began writing articles with vivid descriptions of her life, surroundings and current social and political observations, and by the time of her death in 1940 had written 20 books, including novels. What makes d'Ivray's writing so invaluable is that she was not a tourist or a writer of travelogues but someone who, although she never lost her identity, looked at this country from the inside.
Sir Archibald Edmonstone did come as a tourist, but got so carried away that he has gone down in history as the first "Frank", or foreigner, ever to visit Dakhla Oasis, and even has a mountain there named after him. Anthony J Mills, director of the Dakhla Oasis Project, gives an entertaining account of the Scotsman's race with the Italian Bernadino Drovetti to find the oasis in 1819 -- a little unfairly as Drovetti was unaware that the race was on -- and the Italian's later attempt to usurp his place.
Sophia Lane Poole arrived in Egypt to join her brother Edward William Lane, author of Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians and of Description of Egypt, also edited by Jason Thompson and published recently by AUC for the first time. Lane set his sister to work infiltrating Cairene hareem society in order to report back to him on areas where he could not go. The result was The Englishwoman in Egypt which Lisa Bernasek, in "Unveiling the Orient, unmasking Sophia Poole's Orientalism", says shows that she recognised "the importance of a woman's first hand experience to challenge the misinformation on the hareem" -- the result to a large degree of public enthusiasm, not untinged with titillation, for The Thousand and One Nights (also translated by Lane). Bernasek's account of the collaboration between Lane and Poole and how the material came to be published in the three volumes of The Englishwoman in Egypt, as well as the acclaim the work received, make interesting reading.
John Ruffle, former keeper of Durham University Museum and chairman of the Dakhla Trust, gives us an account of the travels of Major Orlando Felix and Lord Prudhoe, second son of the Duke of Northumberland, from 1826 to 1830 in his chapter "Hieroglyphiseurs Décidés". What a marvellous and humorous observer Felix was, and many cynics would argue his comments still hold true. "The best advice you can give anyone coming to this country whose wishes and purse do not incline him to travel grand, is never to accept any offer of favour from the government." But he enjoyed playing the despot, says Ruffle. Of his journey aboard the Nile boat Felix -- who arrived in Egypt some months before Prudhoe, and travelled to Abu-Simbel -- wrote: "The reis (captain) is obliged to obey us in everything -- to go on when we choose, to stop when we command and to shorten sail at our pleasure. If he resists, the general rule is to knock him down." After Prudhoe arrived the two made further journeys up the Nile, reaching as far as Sennar. They put their stay to some scholarly use, enthusiastically recording inscriptions and complaining bitterly about tomb robbers. "I am bewildering myself with hieroglyphics... Prudhoe is hard at Arabic," Felix wrote from Cairo. They met Lane (whose sponsor Prudhoe later became), Gardner Wilkinson, William Bankes and Jean-François Champollion: it was the latter who dubbed them "hieroglyphiseurs décidés".
While such individuals made small but worthwhile inroads into the budding science of Egyptology, it was the Déscription d'Égypte drawn up by Napoleon Bonaparte's savants that was long held as the instrument responsible for "opening up Egypt to the world". John von B Rodenbeck, former professor of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo, refutes this myth once and for all in "An Orientalist Monument Reconsidered". As Rodenbeck shows, there were several works predating or contemporary with the Déscription. The first Déscription d'Égypte, drawn from the memoirs of a former French consul, had appeared in 1735, 60 years before Napoleon's invasion. Other French, British and Danish scholars had also written of their travels, making it abundantly clear that, far from being off- limits, Egypt was visited frequently by foreigners well before Napoleon arrived. The first Egyptian Society was founded in 1741 by John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich. "The result, decades before 1798," Rodenbeck points out, "was already a corpus of publication larger than that about any country except Palestine, for both popular and learned readership."
Egypt had also been extensively sketched and painted, but it was not until the visits of such artists as David Roberts and John Frederick Lewis that many of the most memorable artistic works were produced. Briony Llewellyn, a historian and specialist in Orientalist artists, looks at the latter in "A 'masquerade' unmasked: an aspect of John Frederick Lewis's Encounter with Egypt". Lewis lived in Cairo during the 1840s and produced some of Orientalism's most sensitive portraits, yet they were sometimes misperceived at home. The way Egypt was presented in contemporary European illustrations was much influenced by prejudice and stereotyping, especially in the press. In the final chapter, "Perceptions of Egypt in the press: an introduction to nineteenth-century newspaper illustration", Nicholas Warner looks at some of these scenes, many of which were wood- engravings based on photographs. Warner, an architect working on the documentation and conservation of Islamic monuments, knows his subject well. The buildings were portrayed aesthetically (but not always accurately), while the group of ladies looking at mummies in the Egyptian Museum, the coffee-house scenes and the views of monuments provide stylised but valuable vignettes. Sadly, by the turn of the century the illustrated papers had begun to substitute photographs for engravings. One mourns the passing of this art form. "Drawn by gifted artists, engraved by master-craftsmen, and produced to rigorous deadlines, such images provide us with a wealth of striking visual material that can never be found in travelers' accounts of their encounters with Egypt."
Reviewed by Jenny Jobbins
