Remarks on Aleppo and on the Journey from That City to Cyprus

Summer 1766. Carsten Niebuhr, sole survivor of the Danish royal expedition to Arabia, halts at Aleppo, the great warehouse of the Levant, where caravans set out for Mosul, Baghdad and Basra under the threat of the Bedouins. In the polyglot household of the Dutch consul van Maseyk, he observes the consuls, the cloth merchants and the monks in search of converts.

A royal order diverts him from the road home: he must look in Cyprus for the "Phoenician" inscriptions once copied by Pococke. On 24 June he leaves Aleppo with a small caravan. A halt at Martahwan with a host from a secret sect, a horse thief at Salchhin, an iron bridge over the Orontes, then Antioch, city of the first Christians, which the surveyor measures step by step. By way of Beilan and Alexandretta he embarks on 13 July and drops anchor at Larnaca on the 18th.

On the island, the inquiry turns into a riddle: where are Pococke's stones, and what language do those of the church of Saint Lazarus bear? All around him, Cyprus is stifling under the poll tax and the tax-farming governors of the grand vizier, and Nicosia rises in revolt.

Then the scholar becomes a storyteller and tells the adventures of two Englishmen of the East, Edward Wortley Montagu and Lord Baltimore, whose extravagances outdo any novel.

A lucid and ironic view of the Ottoman Empire in the Age of Enlightenment, between fieldwork erudition and human curiosity.