Region and period

19th-Century Travel Narratives of the Near East

In the nineteenth century, the eastern Mediterranean became the Western traveler's destination of choice. Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon, provinces of an Ottoman Empire that began reforming itself with the Tanzimat of 1839, were now only a few days from Marseille or Trieste aboard the steamships that replaced sail in the 1830s and 1840s. What had been an expedition became an itinerary.

Scholars led the way. Champollion's decipherment of hieroglyphs in 1822 founded Egyptology, and the Prussian expedition of Richard Lepsius traveled through Egypt and Nubia from 1842 to 1845. The Swiss traveler Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, passing as a Muslim merchant, revealed Petra to Europe in 1812. The American Edward Robinson toured Palestine in 1838 to locate on the ground the places of the Old and New Testaments; the Palestine Exploration Fund, founded in London in 1865, turned this biblical geography into a program of systematic surveys.

The journey to the East also became a literary genre, with its classics and its parodies: Nerval blended narrative and tales in 1851, the Englishman Alexander Kinglake gave it an offhand version in 1844, and Mark Twain mocked American pilgrims and their guides in 1869. Maxime Du Camp brought back from Egypt and Palestine, in 1849-1851, one of the first large bodies of travel photography. Women settled there: Lady Hester Stanhope lived in the Lebanese mountains until her death in 1839, and Lucie Duff Gordon wrote letters from Luxor in the 1860s about the lives of Egyptian peasants. The gaze ran the other way too: the Egyptian imam Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, sent to Paris in 1826 with a student mission, published on his return one of the first Arabic accounts of modern Europe.

Pilgrims formed the other great current. Catholics, Protestants and Russian Orthodox came to Jerusalem by the thousands, and group pilgrimages were organized from France by the middle of the century. Printed guidebooks, travel agencies, the Suez Canal in 1869 and the Jaffa to Jerusalem railway in 1892 did the rest. Yet this journey was never merely picturesque: the consuls of the great powers competed to protect the Christians of the East, and the massacres of 1860 in Lebanon and Damascus brought about a French intervention.

These accounts can be read today on two levels: as testimony about a region on the eve of profound upheavals, and as documents of the way the West looked at it. This collection brings together our editions and a directory of related texts.

Our titles on this subject

Tribulations of a Swiss Man on His Journey to Jerusalem and Lebanon

Johann Heinrich Mayr, 1812-1814

To revive his business, a Swiss man sets out for Constantinople, Egypt, Jerusalem and Lebanon.

Between 1812 and 1814, while Europe fought Napoleon, Johann Heinrich Mayr, a Thurgau textile maker cut off from his markets by the Continental System, crossed the Balkans, Constantinople, Muhammad Ali's Egypt, Jerusalem and Emir Bashir's Mount Lebanon. Alone, sharing no language with his hosts, he lived through plague, quarantines and caravans. His book, published in 1815, offers the rare view of a Protestant merchant, practical and plain-spoken, on the Ottoman East before the great Romantic travellers.

Forty Pilgrims in the Holy Land

Louis Énault, 1824-1900

A Paris journalist follows forty pilgrims all the way to Jerusalem.

In 1853, on the eve of the Crimean War, the question of the Holy Places set Catholic France against Orthodox Russia. That year Louis Énault, a Paris journalist, accompanied some forty French pilgrims from Marseille to Jerusalem, then on to the Jordan, Nazareth and Mount Carmel. His account, published in 1854, captures pilgrimage at the moment steam made it accessible, and a holy city divided between Latins, Greeks, Armenians, Jews and a Turkish garrison.

Journey through Arabia Petraea

Léon de Laborde, 1828

Crossing Sinai, Laborde and Linant de Bellefonds reach Petra and capture it in sixty-nine lithographs.

In the spring of 1828, Léon de Laborde and the engineer Linant de Bellefonds cross Sinai, reach the fortress of Aqaba and spend eight days at Petra, bringing back plans and drawings. Published in Paris from 1830, their *Voyage de l'Arabie Pétrée* made the Nabataean city known through images, while also describing the Bedouin tribes, the Egypt of Muhammad Ali, the monastery of St Catherine and the inscriptions of the valleys of Sinai.

Journey to the Holy Land

Anton Prokesch von Osten, 1829

Future Austrian diplomat Prokesch von Osten sizes up the Holy Land in 1829, just before the Egyptian crisis.

In the spring of 1829, the Austrian major Anton Prokesch lands at the foot of Mount Carmel to obtain from Abdallah, pasha of Acre, redress for the insults offered to the Austrian consul. Between negotiations, he travels the coast from Caesarea, spends Easter in Jerusalem, and reaches Bethlehem, Nazareth, Mount Tabor and the Jordan. His account, published in Vienna in 1831, captures Ottoman Palestine in the last days of the pashalik of Acre, on the eve of the Egyptian conquest of 1831-1832.

Sketches of a Missionary's Travels in Egypt, Syria, Western Africa

Robert Maxwell Macbrair, 1833-1836

A missionary travels up the Nile and confronts fever, marabouts and tolerated slavery.

Published in London in 1839, Robert Maxwell Macbrair's *Sketches* bring two worlds together in a single narrative: on one side the Egypt of Muhammad Ali and the Syria conquered by Ibrahim Pasha, on the other the British colony of the Gambia. A Wesleyan missionary and grammarian of Mandinka, the author bears witness to the plague in Alexandria in 1835, to the pasha's levies of men and monopolies, and then to the life of the Mandinka and the Fula around MacCarthy Island, where slavery persisted.

Visit to the Holy Land, Egypt, and Italy

Ida Pfeiffer, 1842

Alone, a Viennese woman reaches Constantinople, Jerusalem, Damascus and the Nile, and becomes a travel icon.

In 1842, Ida Pfeiffer, a forty-four-year-old Viennese woman, set off alone for Jerusalem by way of the Danube and Constantinople, travelled through Palestine, Damascus, Lebanon and the Egypt of Muhammad Ali, then returned by Malta, Sicily, Naples and Rome. Published anonymously in 1844, this journal, kept day by day, shows the Ottoman Levant of quarantines and pilgrims, seen by a woman who would become the great traveller of her century.

Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo

William Makepeace Thackeray, 1844

Thackeray boards a steamer for the East and skewers the first tourists all the way to Cairo.

In the summer of 1844, Thackeray accepted a berth offered by the Peninsular and Oriental and toured the Levant in two months: Malta, Athens, Smyrna, Constantinople, Beirut, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Alexandria and Cairo. Published in 1846, his account is one of the first to describe the East discovered on a steam cruise. His satire of made-to-order enthusiasm and his grave look at a declining Ottoman Empire make him a singular witness of the journey to the East.

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.

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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Alphonse de Lamartine, Voyage en Orient (1835)

In the autumn of 1832, three years after Prokesch, Alphonse de Lamartine lands at Beirut with his wife and his daughter Julia, then rides to Jerusalem, escorted like a prince. He looks there less for proof than for emotion: the Holy Sepulchre, the Valley of Jehoshaphat and the Mount of Olives become lyrical meditations under his pen. On the return, Julia dies in Beirut, and the journey turns into mourning. His Voyage en Orient, published in 1835, fixed the romantic image of the Holy Land for generations. The contrast with Prokesch is sharp: where the Austrian major records, measures and compares texts, the poet contemplates and remembers.
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Alexandre Pouchkine, Voyage à Arzroum pendant la campagne de 1829 (1836)

In the spring of 1829, Alexander Pushkin sets off without permission to join the Russian army in the Caucasus, at war with the Ottomans. Beyond Tiflis he meets a cart bringing home from Persia the body of the poet and diplomat Griboyedov, massacred in Tehran a few months earlier. He follows General Paskevich's troops to Erzurum, which opens its gates to the Russians, and leaves when plague breaks out there. His Journey to Arzrum, published in 1836, is a dry, ironic narrative, the opposite of the romantic Orient expected of him. It is the same war that weakens the Porte while Prokesch negotiates with the pasha of Acre: two travellers at opposite ends of the Ottoman Empire, in the same spring.
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John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land (1837)

In 1836, the American John Lloyd Stephens follows Laborde's route almost step by step: Cairo, Sinai, the fortress of Aqaba, the Wadi Araba, Petra. He travels in the dress of a Cairo merchant and, at Aqaba, the garrison immediately demands baksheesh: they still remember the shower of gold scattered there ten years earlier by Laborde, and Linant is still known to everyone. In Cairo, Stephens had in fact called on Linant before setting out. His account, published in 1837, lively and ironic, is a great success and launches him towards the Maya cities. To read Stephens after Laborde is to see the same route made more expensive by the passage of the first.
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Edward Robinson et Eli Smith, Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai and Arabia Petraea (1841)

In 1838, the American biblical scholar Edward Robinson travels through Palestine with the missionary Eli Smith, an accomplished Arabist. Bible in hand, compass and measuring tape in their saddlebags, they question villagers about the Arabic names of places and find beneath them a host of forgotten biblical sites. In Jerusalem, Robinson spots on the western wall the springing of an ancient arch that now bears his name. His Biblical Researches, published in 1841, lay the foundations of the historical geography of the Holy Land. Nine years earlier, Prokesch was already practising this surveyor-officer's method: bearings taken by compass, ramparts measured, ancient texts on the city walls debated.
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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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Richard Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1853)

In the summer of 1853, as Énault was embarking at Marseille, the British officer Richard Burton, disguised as a Muslim doctor from Afghanistan, reached Medina and then Mecca with the pilgrim caravan. Two pilgrimages in the same summer, at the two poles of the Mediterranean world: one Christian, open, protected by consuls and steamships; the other forbidden to non-Muslims, carried out under a false name at the risk of his life. Burton's account, published in 1855 and 1856, describes the rites, crowds and roads of the Hejaz with an ethnographer's precision and a marked taste for danger.
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Ludwig August Frankl, The Jews in the East (1856)

Three years after Énault, the Viennese poet Ludwig August Frankl, secretary of the Jewish community of Vienna, went to Jerusalem in 1856 to found a modern school there, the Lämel foundation. His book, published in 1858, describes from within what Énault saw from outside: the life of the city's Jewish communities, their poverty, their disputes, their dealings with the consuls and the Ottoman authorities. The Catholic pilgrim stopped at the Western Wall; Frankl entered homes, synagogues and hospices, and gave the Jerusalem of those years a face that Christian accounts left in shadow.
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Herman Melville, Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant (1856-1857)

In the autumn of 1856, Herman Melville, worn out by the failures of Moby-Dick and Pierre, sets out alone for the Mediterranean. He discovers Constantinople, goes down to Egypt, where the Pyramids overwhelm him, then lands at Jaffa and spends several weeks in Palestine, from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, before Beirut, Greece and Italy. His journal, scribbled day by day and published only in the twentieth century, follows almost the route of Thackeray, but in another key: where the Englishman jokes before the Holy Sepulchre, the American finds a spiritual desert there. From this journey will come Clarel, a long poem on religious doubt published in 1876. See Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant.
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 (1867)

In 1867 Mark Twain boarded the Quaker City in New York with some sixty passengers for one of the first organised cruises to Europe and the Holy Land. Like Énault, he travelled with a party of pilgrims, from Jaffa to Jerusalem, from the Jordan to Nazareth; but where the Parisian is moved, the American mocks the guides, the relics and his own companions. Published in 1869, The Innocents Abroad became its author's best-selling book in his lifetime. Read after Énault, it shows the same sacred road through a sceptical eye, fourteen years later.
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Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1867)

In 1867, Mark Twain sails from New York on the Quaker City for one of the first organised cruises: Gibraltar, Tangier, Italy, Athens, Constantinople, Smyrna, Beirut, the Holy Land and Egypt. It is, twenty-three years later, Thackeray's cruise in an American version, with its pious pilgrims, its travellers who break off souvenirs from the monuments and a narrator who refuses to gush on command. Twain slips onto the Acropolis at night, haggles in the bazaar, is irritated by the relics of Jerusalem and contemplates the Sphinx. Published in 1869, the book became one of the best-selling travel narratives of its day and extends, in a louder tone, the satire of the tourist. See The Innocents Abroad.
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Edward Henry Palmer, The Desert of the Exodus (1871)

In 1869, the Cambridge orientalist Edward Henry Palmer takes part in the survey of Sinai carried out for the Palestine Exploration Fund; he then sets off again with the naturalist Charles Tyrwhitt-Drake to cross on foot, without escort, the desert of the Tih, the limestone plateau that Laborde saw bordering the Wadi Araba to the west. Ten months under a small tent, inscriptions copied in the valleys, nights among the Bedouin who call him Abdallah Effendi: The Desert of the Exodus, published in 1871, seeks, like Laborde's introduction, the traces of the Exodus in the landscape, but with the instruments of a new science. The desert Laborde skirted at last becomes a mapped country.
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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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Amelia B. Edwards, A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1873-1874)

Thackeray stops at Cairo and the Pyramids; the English novelist Amelia Edwards, who arrived in Egypt almost by chance in the winter of 1873, goes much further. On a dahabieh, with a friend and a Nubian crew, she sails up the Nile to Abu Simbel and the second cataract, draws the temples, has sand-buried paintings cleared and is outraged by the plundering. Her book, published in 1877, mixes life on board, landscapes and a scholarship that grows page by page. The journey decides her life: in 1882, she founds the Egypt Exploration Fund in London. See A Thousand Miles up the Nile.
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Laurence Oliphant, Haifa, or Life in Modern Palestine (1882-1885)

In 1882 the British writer and former diplomat Laurence Oliphant settled in Haifa, at the foot of Mount Carmel where Énault's journey ends, and spent his summers in a Druze village on the mountain. His letters to the New York Sun, collected in 1887, describe the German Templer colony, the first Jewish villages, the monasteries, the excavations, the Druze and the Bedouin. Where Énault saw a sacred land frozen in its biblical memories, Oliphant observes a changing country, cleared, settled and coveted. The pilgrims' Carmel becomes in his hands a vantage point on modern Palestine.
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Matilde Serao, In the Country of Jesus (1893)

Forty years after Énault, the Neapolitan journalist Matilde Serao, co-founder of the daily Il Mattino, made her own journey to the Holy Land in 1893 and drew from it a series of articles, collected in a volume in 1898. The same profession, the same Catholic faith, the same road to Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Galilee. Serao writes with fervour and a keen sense of scene, crowds and colour that recalls her predecessor's. The two journalists, the Parisian of the Second Empire and the Neapolitan of the century's end, form a diptych of pilgrimage as seen by the press.
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Pierre Loti, Jérusalem (1894)

In the spring of 1894, after crossing the Sinai on camelback, Pierre Loti arrives in Jerusalem as a pilgrim without faith, come to seek a religious emotion he does not find. Fifty years after Thackeray, he describes the same Holy Sepulchre crowded with rival sects, the same throngs of pilgrims, a grey city under the rain, but in a tone of fervent melancholy that is the exact opposite of the Englishman's irony. Published in 1895, the book forms with Le Désert and La Galilée an Eastern triptych. To read Loti after Thackeray is to measure how the same place can arouse satire in one and nostalgic fervour in the other. See Jérusalem.
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Pierre Loti, Le Désert (1895)

On 22 February 1894, Pierre Loti leaves the Springs of Moses with a camel caravan, climbs to the monastery of Sinai and goes down towards the Gulf of Aqaba, determined to take the longest route, the one through the desert of Petra, precisely because the guides advise him to avoid it. At Aqaba, the Ottoman administrator bars his way: the tribes of Idumea are in revolt, and Loti must turn off towards Gaza across the desert. Le Désert, published in 1895, is a journal of light and silence, all in shades of sand and granite. It shows what the entry into Petra was worth, won by Laborde through patience and gifts.
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19th-Century Travel Narratives of the Near East

Our titles on this subject