Travels in Nubia, Volume I: The Nile from Aswan to Mahass, on the Borders of Dongola
Modernized, illustrated English edition of Travels in Nubia by Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (1813).
After Nubia, this Swiss traveller disguises himself as a pilgrim to enter Mecca and Medina.
Read more ↓- about 240 pages
- Paperback
- English
- 19th century
About this book
Aswan, 24 February 1813. A traveller from Basel, known to the Arabs as Sheikh Ibrahim, mounts his dromedary and sets out alone into Nubia, beyond the first cataract, to follow the Nile upstream to the gates of Dongola.
Johann Ludwig Burckhardt travels up the eastern bank of the Nile, from village to village, with a few letters of recommendation for baggage and a great deal of caution. He passes the avenue of sphinxes at Seboua, stops at Derr with Hassan Kashef, one of the three brothers who hold the country, climbs the rock of Ibrim with an old Bedouin guide, gazes on the second cataract and then crosses the Batn el Hadjar, the "Belly of Stones". Everywhere he must outwit the greed of the chiefs, the fear of spies, and the rumours coming from Dongola, where the Mamelukes have taken refuge.
In the Mahass, before Tinareh, he comes upon a camp of drunken Kashefs, where rifle shots go off under the very roof of the hut. He has to turn back. The return along the western bank becomes a long procession of temples, until, on a slope of sand near Ebsambal, the heads of four colossal statues, almost entirely buried, rise into view.
What does the dune still hide? Burckhardt senses it, and a whole forgotten world comes to the surface beneath his feet.
Product details
- Publisher
- Itinerarium Éditions
- Series
- The Old Orient
- The author
- Johann Ludwig Burckhardt
- Date of the journey
- 1813
- Modern edition by
- Erik de Boisgrollier
- Language
- English
- Format
- Paperback, 6 × 9 in (15.2 × 22.9 cm)
- Pages
- about 240
The author
Johann Ludwig Burckhardt
Johann Ludwig Burckhardt was born in November 1784 in Lausanne to parents from Basel, and grew up in Basel. He studied at Leipzig and then at Göttingen, before leaving for London, where the African Association engaged him to reach inner Africa by way of Cairo. Under the name Sheikh Ibrahim ibn Abdallah, he travelled through Syria, reached Petra in 1812, went up the Nubian Nile in 1813 and discovered the great temple of Abu Simbel almost buried, then visited Mecca and Medina. His accounts, among them Travels in Nubia (London, 1819), appeared after his death, which occurred in Cairo on 15 October 1817.
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Johann Ludwig Burckhardt's Travels in Nubia was published in London by John Murray in 1819, two years after the traveller's death, under the care of the association that had funded his African explorations. Four witnesses were examined: this first English edition; the Travels in Arabia of 1829, drawn from the same notebooks but devoted to the Hejaz; and two German translations published in Weimar, one of the Nubian volume in 1820, the other of the Arabian volume in 1830. The 1829 book is a different work; the translations merely stand between the reader and Burckhardt's English. The text we selected for our work is therefore the 1819 edition, in the Project Gutenberg transcription made from the Internet Archive images.
This transcription has been proofread and cleaned. Around the travel journals, the 1819 volume gathers a substantial apparatus: a memoir by the association, front matter, maps, vocabularies and appendices, all of which has been set aside. The author's notes, on the other hand, have been kept and restored to their reference points, thirty-six in this first volume. It covers the first journey along the Nile, without numbered chapters: the narrative moves forward day by day, under two headings by the author, the outward journey from Aswan to Mahass and then the return towards Aswan. The text thus established runs to about 50,000 words.
How we transform the text. This book is neither a literal translation nor a facsimile: it is a rewriting in today's language, carried out in three stages. Modernisation renders the text in contemporary English; each place and person receives a single modern form, and period terms (currencies, measures, titles) are kept, with a light gloss where needed. Clarification untangles the long sentences of the period, one idea per sentence, adding nothing and removing nothing. Shaping the narrative divides the text into titled chapters and restores its flow; repetitive passages are condensed, but no dated, numbered or named fact is removed. Each stage is followed by a review of fidelity to the original text.
| Status | Edition | Copy | Language | Note | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Selected | Travels in Nubia, London, John Murray, 1819, 1 vol. | Project Gutenberg, transcription by Galo Flordelis from Internet Archive images | English | First edition, published two years after the author's death by the association that had funded his journey; original English text. | View |
| Set aside | Travels in Arabia, London, Henry Colburn, 1829 | Project Gutenberg | English | A separate work, drawn ten years later from the same notebooks and devoted to the Hejaz: it is not the Nubian narrative. | View |
| Set aside | Johann Ludwig Burckhardt's Reisen in Nubien, Weimar, Landes-Industrie-Comptoir, 1820 | Heidelberg University Library (Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg) | German | Contemporary German translation of the 1819 volume: it adds a layer of interpretation when the English original is available. | View |
| Set aside | Johann Ludwig Burckhardt's Reisen in Arabien, Weimar, Landes-Industrie-Comptoir, 1830 | Göttingen State and University Library (Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen) | German | German translation of Travels in Arabia: twice removed from the text, and of a different work from the Nubian narrative. | View |
The journey mapped
In the Same Place, Through the Centuries
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Giovanni Battista Belzoni, Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and Excavations, in Egypt and Nubia (1820)
A former fairground strongman turned antiquities hunter, the Paduan Belzoni meets Burckhardt in Cairo; it is through him that he hears of the sand-buried colossi of Ebsambal, which the traveller from Basel had glimpsed in March…
Read a free edition → -
Frédéric Cailliaud, Voyage à Méroé, au fleuve Blanc, au-delà de Fâzoql, dans le midi du royaume de Sennâr (1826-1827)
A mineralogist from Nantes in the service of Muhammad Ali, Cailliaud first goes up the Nile to the second cataract and Abu Simbel, then sets out again in 1820 on a journey that takes him much farther.
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Maxime Du Camp, Égypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie (1852)
In 1849, Maxime Du Camp leaves for the East with his friend Gustave Flaubert, charged with a photographic mission: he has just learned the paper process from Gustave Le Gray.
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Amelia B. Edwards, A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877)
An English novelist and journalist, Amelia Edwards leaves Cairo in the winter of 1873-1874 on a dahabiah and goes up the river to the second cataract.
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