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American Travelers on the Nile

Early US Visitors to Egypt, 1774-1839

Andrew Oliver author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:The American University in Cairo Press

Published:19th Apr '15

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

American Travelers on the Nile cover

*A fascinating study of the early American experience in Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean *Includes previously unpublished and rarely seen personal travel accounts complemented by more than 30 illustrations

The Treaty of Ghent signed in 1814, ending the War of 1812, allowed Americans once again to travel abroad. Medical students went to Paris, artists to Rome, academics to Gottingen, and tourists to all European capitals. More intrepid Americans ventured to Athens, to Constantinople, and even to Egypt. Beginning with two eighteenth-century travellers, this book then turns to the 25-year period after 1815 that saw young men from East Coast cities, among them graduates of Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, travelling to the lands of the Bible and of the Greek and Latin authors they had first known as teenagers. Drawing on unpublished letters and diaries together with previously neglected newspaper accounts, as well as a handful of published accounts, this book offers a new look at the early American experience in Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean world. More than thirty illustrations complement the stories told by the travellers themselves.

"The highly readable book is a major contribution to the history of Egyptology and to the study of East-West encounter." --Jason Thompson, author of A History of Egypt from Earliest Times to the Present "Andrew Oliver has rescued an earlier, happier American encounter with the Middle East - when American came to admire, to explore and to record. In many cases these American accounts, mostly unpublished, are less arrogant and more original than those by contemporary Europeans. Indispensable for anyone interested in the history of travel, and of the Middle East in the age of Mohammed Ali Pasha." --Philip Mansel, author of Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean. "This book on the little-known history of the American presence in Egypt, which was to have a continuing influence on American art and taste, fills a much-needed gap in both the modern history of Egypt and America" --Morris Bierbrier, Department of Egyptian Antiquities, British Museum. "For those interested in the study of travellers and travel in Egypt, this book is a welcome new source of information about many forgotten journeys and will be valuable for descriptions of Egypt and its monuments" --Neil Cooke, Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near East; "a thorough compendium of travellers' tales, accompanied by appropriate and meticulously researched illustrations... this book is a significant contribution to the history of travellers from the United States to the lands of the Ottoman Empire ...The book could almost be a work of reference it is so packed with encyclopaedic detail ... a fascinating picture of two nations first emerging onto the world stage from the shadow of two great empires." Sheila McGuirk, ASTENE Bulletin 64;

ISBN: 9789774166679

Dimensions: 230mm x 150mm x 36mm

Weight: 910g

432 pages