Islamic art and culture Reviews

This book argues that the historic city we know as Medieval Cairo was created in the nineteenth century by both Egyptians and Europeans against a background of four overlapping political and cultural contexts: the local Egyptian, Anglo-Egyptian, Anglo-Indian, and Ottoman imperial milieux. Addressing the interrelated topics of empire, local history, religion, and transnational heritage, historian Paula Sanders shows how Cairo’s architectural heritage became canonized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book also explains why and how the city assumed its characteristically Mamluk appearance and situates the activities of the European-dominated architectural preservation committee (known as the Comité) within the history of religious life in nineteenth-century Cairo. Offering fresh perspectives and keen historical analysis, this volume examines the unacknowledged colonial legacy that continues to inform the practice of and debates over preservation in Cairo.

The genius and sensitivity of the justly celebrated nineteenth-century Scottish artist David Roberts are fully revealed in this outstanding special three-volume collector’s edition that reproduces in unprecedented print quality all 247 of Roberts’ published drawings of Egypt and the Holy Land. In 1838 and 1839, Roberts spent eleven months traveling and sketching throughout Egypt from Alexandria to Abu Simbel and through Sinai to Petra, Jerusalem, Palestine, and Lebanon. The 247 lithographs that Belgian engraver Louis Haghe then produced at the rate of one a month from the drawings executed during Roberts’ extraordinary trip were published in six volumes by Francis Graham Moon, as The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia (1842–46) and Egypt and Nubia (1846–49). This monumental work assured the artist of a fame that has lasted until the modern day. Once again in this limited collector’s edition, the wonders that Roberts saw on his trip and the style of life in the Middle East in the middle of the nineteenth century are brought vividly to life by the pictures and the original accompanying texts by the Reverend George Croly and William Brockedon. All admirers of David Roberts will want to own this unique and exquisitely produced edition.