The majority of the papers collected here were delivered at ASTENE's VII Biennial Conference, held at the University of Southampton in July 2007. They cover a range of journeys in Egypt, Greece and east as far as Persia and are linked by the light they shed on the experience of travel in these regions from the 17th to the early 20th century. It is not so much what was seen that is assessed here but how one got there and how one got around once arrived; the vicissitudes and travails, both expected and strange, that characterized the passage.

The purpose of the trips examined range...

Cairo has for centuries been recognized as one of the great cities of the world, and this anthology brings together travelers' descriptions of it over the centuries-from the comments of Herodotus to those of Julian Huxley. Perhaps more than anything else in the city, the wonderful mosques with their tall minarets have been admired and written about over the centuries by such travelers as the Frenchman Pierre Loti, the economist Harriet Martineau, and the travel writer Michael Haag.
This anthology gathers together the excitement of arriving in the great city either up the Nile or across...

The stretch of the longest river in the world that nurtured the world's first great civilization has drawn and impressed visitors since ancient times. The Greeks were fascinated by the mysterious annual flood of the Nile that brought both water and nourishing silt to the lands along its banks, while nineteenth-century travelers were amazed by the magnificent tombs and temples of Upper Egypt.
A Nile Anthology brings together the accounts and reflections of visitors and travelers to the Nile between Luxor and Aswan through the ages, from Herodotus in the fifth century BC, and the Arab...

Women travelers in Egypt in the nineteenth century saw aspects of the country unseen by their male counterparts, as they spent time both in the harems of Cairo and with the women they met along the Nile. Some of them, like Sarah Belzoni and Sophia Poole, spoke Arabic. Others wrote engagingly of their experiences as observers of an exotic culture, with special access to some places no man could ever go.
From Eliza Fay's description of arriving in Egypt in 1779 to Rosemary Mahoney's daring trip down the Nile in a rowboat in 2006, this lively collection of writing by women travelers includes...