Travels in Nubia, Volume III: From Shendy to Suakin and Jeddah via the Taka
Modernized, illustrated English edition of Travels in Nubia by Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (1814).
He flees a hostile caravan by night, then reaches Jeddah among black pilgrims.
Read more ↓- about 210 pages
- Paperback
- English
Countries covered: Sudan · Saudi Arabia
About this book
In the spring of 1814, at Shendy, the great market town on the Nile, a poor Muslim trader joins the Suakin caravan. Beneath the garb and the name of Ibrahim hides John Lewis Burckhardt, a Swiss explorer in the service of the African Association, determined to reach the Red Sea across the eastern Sudan.
Three days of desert bring the caravan to the Atbara, among the Bisharein, whose flocks, crops and customs he observes. Farther on, near Goz Radjeb, a threat prowls in the night, while a ruin stands on a granite hill. Then comes the Taka, a fertile land flooded by the Gash, where the Hadendoa trade and where the traveller must display unwavering piety so as not to be unmasked.
With Hadji Aly el Bornaway and the black pilgrims bound for Mecca, he crosses the Langay mountains, the wadis and the salt plain, parched with thirst. At Suakin, the Emir and the Aga Yemak suspect him of being a spy: everything then hangs on a few firmans. There remains the crossing, on an overcrowded boat, from anchorage to anchorage as far as Djebel Mekouar, and then on toward Arabia.
A tale of caravan and sea, of slave trade, pilgrimage and cunning, between the Nile and the Red Sea. Will the traveller reach Jeddah?
Product details
- Publisher
- Itinerarium Éditions
- Series
- The Old Orient
- The author
- Johann Ludwig Burckhardt
- Modern edition by
- Erik de Boisgrollier
- Language
- English
- Format
- Paperback, 6 × 9 in (15.2 × 22.9 cm)
- Pages
- about 210
The author
Johann Ludwig Burckhardt
Johann Ludwig (John Lewis) Burckhardt was born in 1784 in Lausanne to parents from Basel, and grew up in Basel. He studied at Leipzig and then at Göttingen, and the African Association of London hired him to reach the interior of Africa. After learning Arabic, he left Malta in 1809 under the name of Sheikh Ibrahim, travelled through Syria, went up the Nile into Nubia in 1813, then crossed the eastern Sudan from Shendy to Suakin and Jeddah in 1814. His accounts, published after his death as Travels in Nubia (London, 1819), made him famous, together with his rediscovery of Petra and Abu Simbel. He died in Cairo on 15 October 1817.
All books by Johann Ludwig Burckhardt →Sources
Johann Ludwig Burckhardt's Travels in Nubia were published in London by John Murray in 1819, two years after the traveller's death, under the authority of the association that had funded his journey; a second edition followed in 1822. Four witnesses were compared: this 1819 edition, the Travels in Arabia published in 1829 from the same notebooks, and two German translations issued in Weimar. The Travels in Arabia are a separate work; the 1820 translation renders the Nubian narrative into German, the 1830 one the book on Arabia. The text we selected for our work is therefore the original 1819 edition, in the Project Gutenberg transcription made from Internet Archive images.
The transcription was proofread and cleaned. The 1819 volume opens with a memoir by the association and prefatory matter, and closes with vocabularies and appendices: this apparatus has been set aside. Burckhardt's notes, on the other hand, have been kept. The narrative is a travel journal, punctuated by unnumbered subheadings such as Journey from Shendy to Taka or Passage from Souakin to Djidda; this volume runs from Shendy to the crossing of the Red Sea. The text thus established runs to about 40,000 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 made from Internet Archive images | English | First edition, published two years after the traveller's death under the authority of the association that had funded his journey. | View |
| Set aside | Travels in Arabia, London, Henry Colburn, 1829 | Project Gutenberg | English | A separate work, drawn from the same notebooks and devoted to the stay in the Hejaz: it is not the Nubian narrative. | View |
| Set aside | Johann Ludwig Burckhardt's Reisen in Nubien, Weimar, Verlag des Großherzoglich Sächsischen privilegierten Landes-Industrie-Comptoirs, 1820 | Heidelberg University Library | German | German translation of the 1819 book: it stands one step removed from the English text, which remains accessible. | View |
| Set aside | Johann Ludwig Burckhardt's Reisen in Arabien, Weimar, Verlag des Großherzoglich Sächsischen privilegierten Landes-Industrie-Comptoirs, 1830 | SUB Göttingen (Göttingen Digitization Centre) | German | German translation of the 1829 Travels in Arabia, a different work: it does not contain the Nubian narrative. | View |
The journey mapped
In the Same Place, Through the Centuries
-
Frédéric Cailliaud, Voyage à Méroé, au fleuve Blanc, au-delà de Fâzoql dans le midi du royaume de Sennâr (1819-1822)
Five years after Burckhardt, Frédéric Cailliaud of Nantes goes up the Nile in the wake of the army of Ismail Pasha, sent by Muhammad Ali to conquer Nubia and Sennar.
-
Samuel White Baker, The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia (1861-1862)
In 1861, Samuel Baker and his companion Florence leave Berber to explore the Atbara, the river Burckhardt had followed with the Suakin caravan.
Read a free edition → -
Theodore et Mabel Bent, Southern Arabia (1895-1896)
A tireless amateur archaeologist, Theodore Bent travels with his wife Mabel through southern Arabia, Socotra and, in 1895-1896, the African coast of the Red Sea.
Read a free edition → -
Winston Churchill, The River War (1898)
A young officer and war correspondent, Winston Churchill follows the reconquest of the Sudan by Kitchener's Anglo-Egyptian army in 1898 and rides with the lancers at Omdurman.
Read a free edition →
The modern editor
More in this series
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