Our titles on this subject
Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme
Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.
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Ibn Joubayr, Relation des voyages (1183-1185)
The Andalusian pilgrim from Valencia made the pilgrimage to Mecca between 1183 and 1185 and wrote the notebook that would found the classical Arabic genre of the rihla. He passed through the same Egyptian ports, sailed down the Red Sea, and saw Mecca one hundred forty years after Nasir, under the Ayyubids of Saladin. More literary, more brilliant, and also more laudatory toward the restored Sunni power, he completes his predecessor on every point where Nasir remained silent. The two notebooks read almost like a two-voice score on the same Levant.
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Ibn Battuta, Voyages (1325-1354)
The great traveler from Tangier crisscrossed, over thirty years between 1325 and 1354, the entire Muslim world, from sub-Saharan Africa to China. When he passes through Jerusalem, Cairo, or Mecca, it is three centuries after Nasir, and the world has been transformed: the Crusades over, the Mongols established, the Mamluks in Cairo. The contrast with the Persian's notebook gives the measure of what has changed. Where Nasir describes in a few pages, Ibn Battuta expands into personal adventures, marriages, learned disputes, and princely banquets.
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Constantin-François Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte (1783-1785)
Less than twenty years after Niebuhr, the young Volney travels through Egypt and Syria and publishes, in 1787, the very year of the Remarks on Aleppo, a picture that would become authoritative. His pashalik of Aleppo overlaps Niebuhr's line for line: villages abandoned at the edge of the desert, the road to Alexandretta infested with thieves, fallen Antioch, the fevered air of Alexandretta and the refuge of Beilan in the mountains. He adds the carrier pigeons and the famous Aleppo button. But Volney generalizes and judges Ottoman despotism as a philosopher of the Enlightenment, whereas Niebuhr, more modest, tells what he has seen and lets the reader conclude.
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Volney, Voyage en Égypte et en Syrie (1787)
The French philosopher traveled through the Ottoman Orient between 1783 and 1785 and published his account in Paris in 1787. He describes Jerusalem, Damascus, Cairo, and the Levantine coast with a rationalist and critical eye. The same geography as Nasir's, seven centuries later, under another empire and other dynasties. A foundational text of modern Orientalism, illuminating to read after the Persian because it shows, ten generations later, what the same land had become: an Ottoman Levant, impoverished, numbed, yet still largely recognizable as the one Nasir had crossed.
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Ali Bey el-Abbassi, Voyages d'Ali Bey el Abbassi en Afrique et en Asie (1803-1807)
Under an assumed name and in the costume of a Muslim prince, the Catalan Domingo Badía crosses Morocco, Egypt, Mecca, Syria and Anatolia. In the spring of 1806, a storm nearly swallows his ship before he lands at Larnaca. From there he makes his way to Nicosia through hills he finds worthy of the island's goddess, notes the richness of the soils and observes a Cyprus still squeezed by its governors. His Travels, published in Paris in 1814, offer a striking counterpoint to Niebuhr's pages: forty years later, the same island seen by a false Muslim who served Napoleon's policy.
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Chateaubriand, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1806-1807)
Setting out in 1806, the French writer crossed Greece, reached Constantinople, landed in the Holy Land, visited Jerusalem and Bethlehem, then returned by way of Egypt and the Maghreb. His account, published in Paris in 1811, follows almost step by step Nasir's Syro-Palestinian route, but the gaze has changed entirely: where the Persian measures cubits and counts gates, the Romantic seeks ruins, tombs, and emotion. Two opposite ways of keeping a notebook before the same stones.
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Jean Louis Burckhardt, Travels in Syria and the Holy Land (1810-1812)
Sent by the African Association of London to prepare for crossing the Sahara, the Swiss Burckhardt chooses Aleppo as his school: he learns Arabic there, lives under the name of Sheikh Ibrahim and radiates from it across all of Syria. Lebanon, the Orontes valley, the Hauran, then in 1812 the road to Cairo, during which he becomes the first modern European to describe Petra. His journals, published in 1822 after his death, extend Niebuhr's gaze exactly: the same patience, the same taste for measured itineraries, the same attention to the sects and tribes that hurried travelers ignore.
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Alphonse de Lamartine, A Pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1832-1833)
Twenty years after Mayr, Alphonse de Lamartine landed at Beirut in 1832 with his wife and his daughter Julia, who died there in December. He visited Jerusalem, Damascus, Baalbek and the cedars, called on Emir Bashir, whose cruelty Mayr had reported, then returned by way of Constantinople and, like him, overland through Bulgaria and Serbia. Published in 1835, his Voyage en Orient is the great Romantic account of these places. The contrast could not be sharper: where the merchant counts piastres and days of quarantine, the poet prays, dreams and composes.
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Alexander Kinglake, Eothen (1834-1835)
In 1834 the young Englishman Alexander Kinglake left Belgrade and rode across the Ottoman Balkans to Constantinople, then on to Smyrna, Cyprus, Beirut, Nazareth, Jerusalem and, through the desert, to Cairo during the plague of 1835. It is almost Mayr's itinerary twenty years on, with the same quarantines and the same fear of contagion. Eothen, published in 1844, is written with a nonchalant humour that has made it a classic. The Swiss merchant and the English gentleman share a dislike of bombast and a taste for the lived anecdote.
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Edward Lane, Mœurs et coutumes des Égyptiens modernes (1836)
The English Arabist settled in Cairo in 1825, then again in 1833, in the time of Muhammad Ali, and published in 1836 the most meticulous description of the Cairo of his century. He too distinguishes, as Nasir had eight hundred years earlier, between Cairo and Old Cairo, the pomp of power and the abundance of the bazaars. It is the same labyrinth of alleys, the same call to prayer, the same spice merchants, but the dynasty has changed many times over and the caliphate no longer exists. Lane completes from within what Nasir had begun: an anthropology of the city as lived.
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Hans Christian Andersen, A Poet's Bazaar (1840-1841)
In the spring of 1841 Hans Christian Andersen returned from Constantinople by the Black Sea and the Danube, on the steamers that now plied the river up to Vienna. He did quarantine at Orsova, the frontier town where Mayr had spent twenty-one days in the lazaretto in November 1813, and describes the Bulgarian, Serbian and Wallachian banks. The book, published in 1842, turns the journey into a poetic tableau. What had been for Mayr a dangerous crossing by caravan and boat had become, a generation later, a steamboat cruise; but the lazaretto had hardly changed.
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Gérard de Nerval, Voyage en Orient (1843)
Nine years after Macbrair, Gérard de Nerval lands at Alexandria early in 1843 and settles in Cairo, where he rents a house, buys a Javanese slave girl and has the legend of the caliph Hakim told to him. He then travels on to Beirut and Mount Lebanon, at the heart of the rivalries between Druze and Maronites that Macbrair had already seen fermenting under Ibrahim Pasha. His Voyage en Orient, published in 1851, blends reportage, reverie and embedded tales. The contrast is complete: the poet seeks in the East a mystery to love, the missionary a people to save, yet both describe the same teeming city, its cafés, its markets and its alleys.
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Harriet Martineau, Eastern Life, Present and Past (1848)
Four years after Ida Pfeiffer, the Englishwoman Harriet Martineau, already famous for her writings on political economy, set out in turn for the East at the end of 1846. She goes up the Nile into Nubia, crosses Sinai, visits Petra, then Jerusalem, Galilee and Damascus. Like the Viennese woman, she travels as a mature woman, not letting the fatigues of the saddle and the tent stop her. But where Pfeiffer prays, Martineau reasons: her Eastern Life, Present and Past turns Egyptian temples and holy places into stages in a history of religions, to the point of scandalising some of her readers. Two women before the same stones, two ways of believing.
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Gustave Flaubert, Voyage en Orient (1849-1851)
In November 1849, Gustave Flaubert, aged twenty-seven, sails from Marseille with Maxime Du Camp, who has been entrusted with a photographic mission. They ascend the Nile in a cangia as far as the Second Cataract, stop at Philae, Thebes and Esna, then go on to Beirut, Jerusalem, Damascus and Baalbek. The notes and letters from this journey, published after the writer's death, are raw, funny, sensual, with a painter's precision. Fifteen years after Macbrair, Flaubert follows almost the same route, from Cairo to the ruins of Baalbek, but with the eye of an artist who wants to see everything and judge nothing: the reader can set two views side by side, one pious, the other profane, of the same riverbanks.
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Thomas Eyre Poole, Life, Scenery, and Customs in Sierra Leone and the Gambia (1850)
Colonial and garrison chaplain at Freetown, the Reverend Thomas Eyre Poole published in London, in 1850, two volumes on Britain's West African colonies. From Sierra Leone he moves on to the Gambia, visits the settlements on the river and travels a long way up it. He depicts the life of the colonists, of the liberated Africans and of the riverside peoples, and dwells on the neglected churches, the cemeteries overrun by grass and the fevers that cut down Europeans, which he himself survives several times. The reader rediscovers the fragile colony, with its trading posts and missions, that Macbrair had known, seen this time by an Anglican clergyman rather than a Methodist.
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Herman Melville, Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant (1856-1857)
In December 1856, Herman Melville, exhausted by the failure of his last novels, arrives in the Levant. He sees Constantinople, the pyramids of Giza, then Jaffa and Jerusalem in January 1857, before returning by Beirut, Greece, Naples and Rome. His Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant, kept in rapid notes, is dark: Judea seems to him a landscape of stones and desolation, far from the Promised Land. The reader of Pfeiffer finds the same stages here, from the Bosphorus to Vesuvius, but seen by a man who seeks faith instead of bringing it with him. These pages would feed his long poem Clarel, published in 1876.
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Lucie Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt (1862-1869)
Suffering from tuberculosis, Lucie Duff Gordon went to Egypt in 1862 in search of drier air and spent the last years of her life there. She settles in Luxor in the "French House" built on the roofs of the temple, learns Arabic, treats the peasants, receives notables and Copts, and writes to her family letters of rare freedom, published as early as 1865. In them she describes the corvée, the taxes and the levies of men that crush the fellahin, as Macbrair had done thirty years earlier under Muhammad Ali. But where the missionary saw souls to be won, she sees neighbours and friends, and reading her one measures all that European arrogance let slip.
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Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1869)
In 1867, Mark Twain embarks on the Quaker City with a group of American pilgrims, for one of the first organised cruises to the Holy Land. Naples and Vesuvius, Rome, Constantinople, Smyrna, Beirut, Baalbek, Damascus, Galilee, Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, then the pyramids: the list of stops almost matches Ida Pfeiffer's. But where the Viennese woman travelled alone and on a budget, Twain in The Innocents Abroad describes nascent tourism, its guides, its souvenirs and its passengers who chip off pieces of monuments. His irony about doubtful relics and disputed holy places sometimes joins, with more bite, the good sense of Pfeiffer.
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Amelia B. Edwards, A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1873-1874)
A novelist and journalist, Amelia Edwards arrives in Egypt almost by chance, in November 1873, to escape the rain of Europe. She hires a dahabeah and sails up the Nile beyond Abu Simbel to the Second Cataract, sketching everything she sees. Her book, published in 1877, combines humour, erudition and indignation at monuments mutilated by treasure hunters and visitors. In 1882 she would found the Egypt Exploration Fund, to excavate and protect this heritage. Macbrair had seen the same temples at Thebes, Edfu and Philae; forty years later, Edwards shows what nascent tourism had made of this Nile of missionaries and pashas.
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Samuel White Baker, Cyprus as I Saw It in 1879 (1879)
A year after the Ottoman Empire ceded the administration of Cyprus to Great Britain, the Nile explorer Samuel Baker lands at Larnaca and travels the island for several months with his wife Florence, by cart and under canvas. He describes the roads, the devastated forests, the peasants, the taxes, the towns of Nicosia, Kyrenia and Famagusta, and judges the new administration as harshly as the old. More than a century after Niebuhr, the question remains the same: why is so fertile an island so poor? Baker's answer, that of a pragmatic colonist, echoes the anger of the Cypriots of 1766.
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Guy Le Strange, Palestine sous les musulmans (1890)
In 1890, the English orientalist gathered the descriptions that Arab and Persian geographers had left of Syria and Palestine from the seventh to the fifteenth century, giving considerable space to Nasir's account of Jerusalem and the Haram. Reading this collection after the Safarnama places the Persian's notebook within the chorus of all those who described the holy city before the Crusaders: Le Strange translates, compares, situates, and lets Nasir's voice be heard among his peers.
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Pierre Loti, Jérusalem (1895)
In the spring of 1894, Pierre Loti crosses the Sinai desert on camelback, then reaches Jerusalem, where he spends several weeks. The book he draws from it, Jerusalem, published in 1895, is that of a believer without faith who still hopes for some emotion before the tomb of Christ and finds a city already changed by hotels, crowds of pilgrims and new buildings. Half a century separates the two journeys: the Via Dolorosa, the Mount of Olives and the Valley of Jehoshaphat are the same, but Pfeiffer's Jerusalem, a small Ottoman town whose gates were closed at night, has begun to spread beyond its walls.
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Gertrude Bell, Syria: The Desert & the Sown (1905)
In early 1905, Gertrude Bell leaves Jerusalem on horseback, crosses the Hauran and the Druze country, reaches Damascus, Homs and Hama, then lingers at Aleppo before descending by Antioch to Alexandretta, where her book, published in 1907, ends. It is almost Niebuhr's itinerary, in the opposite direction and a hundred and forty years later: the same Bedouins masters of the desert, the same Nusayris, the same ruins of Antioch. Bell, an archaeologist and future player in British policy in Iraq, writes with a sense of dialogue and portrait that makes this account one of the classics of travel in the Levant.
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