Travels in Nubia, Volume II: The Deserts of Nubia, Berber and Shendy
Modernized, illustrated English edition of Travels in Nubia by Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (1813-1814).
Disguised as a poor merchant, he crosses the Nubian desert with a slave caravan.
Read more ↓- about 290 pages
- Paperback
- English
- 19th century
About this book
March 1814, at Daraw in Upper Egypt: dressed as a poor merchant, Burckhardt slips into a slave caravan about to cross the Nubian desert.
No one must know who he is. His companions despise him, watching him cut his own firewood, cook his own meal and fill his own waterskins. The desert sets its trials: gunshots among the rocks of Akaba, scarce wells, thirst at Shigre where a waterskin is lost, the gravel plain where tales are told of caravans gone astray.
At the end of the track lie Berber and its four villages, its nights of bouza and dancing, its fakirs selling amulets and the tolls of the Mek. Then the road south: the greedy welcome of Mek Hamze, the crossing of the Mogren, and Damer, the city of the Fakys, where the traveller recites the Koran at a funeral vigil.
At last comes Shendy, under the authority of Mek Nimr. For a month Burckhardt observes the greatest market of the eastern Sudan: the gold and ivory of Sennar, the caravans of Kordofan, the goods of Cairo, and the thousands of slaves sold each year, whose fate he describes with unvarnished precision.
The report of a scrupulous observer on the Nubia of 1814, and a question that remains: by what route, from here, can one reach the Red Sea?
Product details
- Publisher
- Itinerarium Éditions
- Series
- The Old Orient
- The author
- Johann Ludwig Burckhardt
- Date of the journey
- 1814
- Modern edition by
- Erik de Boisgrollier
- Language
- English
- Format
- Paperback, 6 × 9 in (15.2 × 22.9 cm)
- Pages
- about 290
The author
Johann Ludwig Burckhardt
Johann Ludwig (John Lewis) Burckhardt was born in Lausanne in November 1784 and grew up in Basel, then studied at Leipzig and Göttingen. Hired in 1806 by the African Association of London, he learned Arabic, took the name Sheikh Ibrahim and travelled through Syria, Nubia, Arabia and Sinai. In 1814 he followed a merchant caravan across the desert to Berber and Shendy, an account that forms the core of his Travels in Nubia, published in London in 1819. He is regarded as the first European to have seen Petra and Abu Simbel. He died in Cairo on 15 October 1817, before he could set out for Fezzan and Timbuktu.
All books by Johann Ludwig Burckhardt →Sources
Travels in Nubia was published in London by John Murray in 1819, two years after Burckhardt's death, under the care of the association that had funded his journey; a second edition followed in 1822. Four witnesses were examined. The 1819 edition is available in a transcription made from an Internet Archive facsimile. Travels in Arabia, published in 1829 by Henry Colburn, is a different work, devoted to his stay in the Hejaz. The two volumes published in Weimar are German translations: that of 1820 translates the journey in Nubia, that of 1830 the work on Arabia. The text we selected for our work is therefore the original 1819 edition, in the Project Gutenberg transcription.
This transcription has been proofread and cleaned. The association's memoir placed at the head of the book, the preliminary matter, the vocabularies and the appendices have been set aside. This second volume opens with the account of the 1814 journey; its general heading, which applies to the whole account, has been removed, while Burckhardt's footnotes have been kept and returned to their call points. The account has no chapters: it runs on without a break, marked by three of the author's subheadings. The text thus established runs to about 64,000 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, by the late John Lewis Burckhardt, London, John Murray, 1819, 1 vol., published by the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa | Project Gutenberg (eBook 71129), transcription made from an Internet Archive facsimile | English | First edition, published two years after the author's death by the association that had funded his journey; a second edition followed in 1822. | View |
| Set aside | Travels in Arabia, London, Henry Colburn, 1829 | Project Gutenberg | English | Another work by Burckhardt, devoted to his stay in the Hejaz: it is not the account of the journey in Nubia. | 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 English edition; since the original text is accessible, it only adds one more layer of interpretation. | 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, hence of a work other than the journey in Nubia, two removes from the original. | View |
The journey mapped
In the Same Place, Through the Centuries
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Frédéric Cailliaud, Voyage à Méroé, au fleuve Blanc, au-delà de Fâzoql (1819-1822)
Six years after Burckhardt, the Nantes mineralogist Frédéric Cailliaud ascends the Nile in the wake of the army with which Ismail Pasha, son of Muhammad Ali, is conquering the Sudan.
Read a free edition → -
George Bethune English, Récit de l'expédition de Dongola et de Sennar (1820-1821)
An extraordinary figure, the American George Bethune English, a former officer, enters the service of Muhammad Ali and commands the artillery of Ismail Pasha's expedition in 1820.
Read a free edition → -
George Alexander Hoskins, Voyages en Éthiopie au-dessus de la deuxième cataracte du Nil (1833)
In February 1833, the English draughtsman George Hoskins leaves Korosko by camel to cross the great Nubian desert, regains the Nile near Abu Hamed, then proceeds to Berber, the pyramids of Meroë and Shendy.
Read a free edition → -
Bayard Taylor, Voyage en Afrique centrale (1851-1852)
The American poet and journalist Bayard Taylor leaves Cairo in November 1851, crosses the Nubian desert from Korosko to Abu Hamed, then travels south through Berber, the Atbara confluence, Damer, Meroë, Shendy and El Metemma to…
Read a free edition →
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