No land on earth has been so comprehensively observed as Egypt, which was attracting awestruck travelers back in the days of Herodotus and Julius Caesar. This rich and varied collection brings the diversity and the continuity of Egypt together to give a picture of this country, its many places, its long history, and its people: the pharoahs, sultans, pilgrims to Sinai, Crusaders, and Napoleon, followed by the Grand Tourists of the eighteenth century and those less grand with Thomas Cook in the nineteenth. The range of voices gathered here is dazzling: an ancient myth from a papyrus next to Naguib Mahfouz’s account of Alexandria, Florence Nightingale describing Abu Simbel side by side with Ahdaf Soueif’s description of Sinai. A description of medieval Cairo by Ibn Jubayr walks hand in hand with one of the modern city by the Egyptian thinker Taha Hussein. Lucie Duff-Gordon sails up the Nile, Edward Lane crawls through a sand-filled temple, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel struggles up the cataract above Aswan.
Egypt and the Nile
Through Writers’ Eyes
No land on earth has been so comprehensively observed as Egypt, which was attracting awestruck travelers back in the days of Herodotus and Julius Caes
$24.95
Deborah Manley has lived in India, Canada, and Nigeria. She is the author of a number of books, including The Trans-Siberian Railway: A Traveller’s Anthology. Sahar Abdel-Hakim is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Cairo University. They are both founding members of the Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near East (ASTENE), and are the editors of Traveling through Egypt (AUC Press, 2004) and Egypt and the Nile (AUC Press, 2008).
Deborah Manley has lived in India, Canada, and Nigeria. She is the author of a number of books, including a biography of Henry Salt and The Trans-Siberian Railway: A Traveller’s Anthology. Sahar Abdel-Hakim is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Cairo University. She is the author of a number of essays on women travelers to Egypt. They are both founding members of the Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near East (ASTENE). Together they edited Traveling through Egypt: From 450 b.c. to the Twentieth Century (AUC Press, 2004).
