Endorsements: ""A number of recent books have underlined the importance of Carsten Niebuhr's travels in the Near East, but no one has brought Niebuhr, and his scholarship, to life as successfully as does Roger Guichard in this highly readable book. Guichard accomplishes this by describing in detail how Niebuhr spent his year (1761-62) in Egypt, negotiating the suspicions of many Egyptians and ignoring the almost exclusively biblical interests of his European patrons. Guichard introduces us to a man who read extensively, measured carefully, and did not hesitate to seek out local informants and...

When Roger H. Guichard Jr. discovered a French translation of the works of Carsten Niebuhr, sole survivor of the 1761-1767 Royal Danish Expedition to the Yemen, he was astounded. 'They were not just another dry account of one man's travels, but represented the record of a serious intellectual enterprise involving Enlightenment science, sacred philology, the Bible as history, "Orientalism," Egyptology, and discovery'. Having translated them from French to English, and then cross-referenced his translations with the original German texts, 'Niebuhr in Egypt' is not, as one might expect, simply a...

Visitors have often remarked on the light of Egypt. There is something about the soft diffusion of sunlight in the country that makes it visually special. Beginning in the early nineteenth century a combination of that light and the new, more sensitive technology of lithography conspired together to allow artists to capture with unprecedented fidelity the country's monuments, Pharaonic as well as Islamic. But there is another way in which the word ""light"" captures the reality of Egypt. In Arabic it is said that the blood of a people is either ""light"" or ""heavy."" Where the blood of...