Great Explorers: Middle East
The great European explorers of the Middle East are noted for their extraordinary endurance, epic journeys often involving a lifelong commitment and a habit of going native.
This fascination with the ancient world reached a high point during the Age of Enlightenment, when scholars and adventurers sought inspiration and knowledge from the ancient societies of Greece,Italy, Egypt, and the Islamic world. These explorers were not only adventurers, they also included artists who have left us with great depictions ,often idealised, of life in what seemed a foreign and exotic world.
In more recent times, these depictions have been branded racist and demeaning, an example of misunderstanding of cultures still prevalent today-notably by American Palestinian scholar, Edward Said in his book, Orientalism.
The French under Napoleon were among the first Europeans in the Modern Age to explore the cultures of the ancient societies of the Near East. After Napoleon invaded Egypt at the end of the 18th century, he dispatched scientific expeditions whose task it was to understand the culture of the ancient Egyptians and publishe academic volumes on its history and beliefs.
It was Napoleon’s troops who discovered the Rosetta Stone-here at Rosetta on the Mediterranean coast which over time would unlock the mystery of understanding ancient hieroglyphics.
When Napoleon’s expedition was ultimately unsuccessful and the French capitulated to the British, the British actually seized all ofthe antiquities and all of the artefacts that France had taken during their time in Egypt and Syria. That’s actually also how Britain and the British Museum, came into possession so many Egyptian artefacts including the Rosetta Stone, which ended up in 1803 in the British museum.
About the time Napoleon and his scientists were exploring Egypt, the first of Europe’s solo adventurers and explorers were hitting the road. But Muslim travellers had travelled the region for centuries. Most famous was Ibn Battuta, a native of Tangier in Morocco.
He became known as the Muslim Marco Polo, making epic journeys over a period of 25 years during the 13th century.
He is one of our four great explorers of the Middle East profiled here:
Ibn Batouta
Ibn Batouta was one of the Moslem world’s great travellers, making historic journeys throughout the Middle East, Africa and Asia centuries before many Europeans made similar journeys and discoveries.
Batouta left his native Tangier at the age of 21 to make a short journey throughout Morocco but ended up staying away almost 30 years .visiting places as diverse as Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Mali , Tanzania and India.
Travelling about the same time as Marco Polo, his writings helped inform the Moslem world about foreign cultures almost 200 years before the journeys by Columbus to open up the New World. Batoutta’s journey made him famous in Morocco and his insights were valued by the sultans . He eventually returned to Tangier where he lived as a respected civic elder. He died here and his tomb is sited in the Tangier kasbah.
Ulrich Jasper Seetzen
Among the first Europeans hundreds of years later, was German explorer, Ulrich Jasper Seetzen, also known as Musa Al-Hakim. A medical graduate from the University of Göttingen, he was instead filled with a desire to travel.
In the summer of 1802, he started down the Danube. A year later, he was in Constantinople, 6 months later in Aleppo, where he remained for another 18.
Now speaking Arabic and travelling as a native, he journeyed to Jordan and Palestine and into the wilderness of Sinai and onto Cairo.
His chief exploit was a tour around the Dead Sea, which he made without a companion and in the disguise of a beggar.
From Egypt, he went to Jedda and reached Mecca as a pilgrim in October 1809. After his pilgrimage, he converted to Islam and changed his name to Musa Al-Hakim. His last letters were written in November 1810. In September the following year he set out to Muscat in Oman, but was found dead two days later allegedly poisoned by his guides.
Johann Ludwig Burkhardt
One of the earliest European explorers of the Middle East was Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, also known as John Lewis in English, and Joseph Lewis in French.
Napoleon Bonaparte had invaded not only Egypt, but Burckhardt’s home country Switzerland, when he was a teenager. And his wealthy protestant father had brought the family to England. Unable to secure a government job, Burckhardt ended up here in Cambridge after being taken on by the Africa Association.
This was headed by Sir Joseph Banks, who had been the botanist on Cook’s famous journey of discovery in 1770. Banks was busy dispatching explorers across the globe to further British interests.The Association was keen to explore more of the African continent,which remained a mystery. Explorers were searching for the source of the Niger River, and the Association wanted to mount a noble land journey from Cairo to Timbuktu to find out more.
Burkhardt was given an incredible eight years to complete the assignment , from which he never returned.
After getting a job at the Association, Burkhardt prepared for the journey by attending Cambridge University, where he studied Arabic, science, and medicine.
Years later, many of Burckhardt’s famous manuscripts collected during his Middle Eastern adventures would be bequeathed to Cambridge, and they are still in its library today.
It’s still unclear whether Burckhardt converted to Islam. But while at Cambridge, he began to adopt Arabic costume, and would soon assume the alias Sheikh Ibrahim Ibn Abdallah.
Burckhardt is most famous for discovering extraordinary examples of rock-cut architecture- the ruins of the ancient Nabataean city of Petra in Jordan, and the temples of Abu Simbel in Egypt.
In 1809, Burckhardt left England and travelled to Aleppo, Syria to perfect his Arabic and Muslim customs. En route to Syria, he stopped in Malta and learned of Seetzen who had left Cairo in search of the lost city of Petra and had subsequently been murdered.
Once in Syria, like Seetzen, Burckhardt adopted his alias,Sheikh Ibrahim Ibn Abdallah, to hide his true European identity.
Burckhardt was robbed of his belongings more than once by people he had paid to guarantee his protection.
After more than 2 years living and studying as the Muslim in Aleppo, he felt he could travel safely and not be questioned about his identity. To test his disguise, he travelled in various disguises as a poor Arab sleeping on the ground and eating with camel drivers.
He travelled on his own without an entourage e or military protection, sometimes as an Indian merchant or later a Moorish merchant. He changed his disguise depending on where he was.
Many respects Burkhardt travelled with the curiosity of a backpacker and some have described him as the world’s first backpacker.
Burkhardt left Aleppo in early 1812 and headed south to the Damascus and Amman heading for Cairo.
Along the more dangerous inland route to Aqaba, Burckhardt encountered rumours of ancient ruins in a narrow valley near the supposed Biblical tomb of Aaron, the brother of Moses. This region was the former Roman province of Arabia Petraea, leading him to believe these were the ruins he had heard about in Malta.
Telling his guide that he wished to sacrifice a goat at the tomb, he was led through the narrow valley where in August 1812, he became the first modern European to lay eyes on the ancient Nabataean city of Petra.
In his journal he wrote: “I was without protection in the midst of desert when no traveller had ever before been seen. Great must have been the opulence of a city which could dedicate such monuments to the memory of its rulers.”
Burkhardt could not remain long at the ruins or take detailed notes due to his fears of being unmasked as a treasure-seeking infidel.
He continued his travels and after crossing the southern deserts of Transjordan and the Sinai Peninsula, he arrived in Cairo in September 1812. After spending 4 months with no westbound caravans across the Sahara available, Burkhardt decided to journey up the Nile River to Upper Egypt in Nubia. He justified this to his employer with the argument that the information he would collect on African cultures would help him in his planned journey to West Africa.
But Burkhardt’s journey south was blocked by hostile natives.Returning north, he came across the sand-chalked ruins of the Great Temple of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel in March 1813. After considerable effort, he was still unable to excavate the entrance to the temple.
He later told his friend Giovanni Belzoni about the ruins. Belzoni was a prolific Italian explorer and pioneer archaeologist of Egyptian antiquities, and it was he who later returned in 1817 to excavate the temple.
In Cairo, Burkhardt also introduced the Great Belzoni to Henry Salt, the British Counsel to Egypt. Henry Salt was an English artist, traveller, collector of antiques, Egyptologist, and now diplomat, who commissioned Belzoni to remove the colossal bust of Ramesses II from Thebes to the British Museum.
This is still on prominent display at the British Museum in London.It weighed over 7 tons. It took Belzoni 17 days and 130 men to towit to the river. He used levers to lift it onto rollers, then he had his men, distributed equally with 4 ropes, drag it on the rollers.
Burkhardt spent the remaining 2 years of his life editing his journals and living modestly in Cairo while waiting and preparing for the caravan that would take him to the West across the Sahara to Timbuktu and the Niger River, a journey that would never happen. In Cairo, he was again stricken with dysentery, and died in October 1817. He was buried as a Muslim in Cairo , and a tombstone over his grave bears the name he assumed on his travels in Arabia.
All the while, Burkhardt had been transmitting his journals and notes and copy of a series of letters back to Cambridge, so very few details of his journey have been lost. His collection of 800 volumes of oriental manuscripts at the library there remain a precious and unique resource of life in the Middle East, and one of the first-hand European accounts of it.
Burkhardt was a trailblazer, an academic ,anthropologist, linguist, and adventurer who went native.
As word and interest spread about the discoveries in the Middle East and the civilizations and cultures there, some leading artists of the age followed explorers into the region.
Richard Burton
It was against this national fascination with the Orient that another great Victorian explorer would emerge. Richard Francis Burton was also a writer, orientalist scholar, soldier, and linguist.According to one count, he spoke 29 languages.
Richard Burton was in many ways the quintessential orientalist.but also a controversial character . Critics say he indulged in European stereotypes of the region and displayed a cavalier attitude towards the people in the region and was extraordinarily entitled in his approach to his material.
Burton’s family travelled extensively, and Burton regarded himself as an outsider for much of his life.
His magnum opus was a translation of the Arabian Nights, which was the first version in any European language to include the entire set of tales, including the controversial ones that other previous translators thought would be too coarse and too impolite for nice polite European taste. Burton was very much interested in sexuality, especially the sort of sexuality that would upset Victorian society.
At Oxford, Burton is said to have challenged another student to a duel , after the latter mocked Burton’s moustache. Burton stirred the bile of the dons by speaking real—that is, Roman—Latin instead of the artificial type peculiar to England, and he spoke Greek aromatically with the accent of Athens as he had learned it from a Greek merchant in Marseille.
Burton was the ultimate Victorian polymath.-writer, linguist, translator, swordsman, diplomat, soldier, spy and explorer.
Burton’s best known achievements include a well-documented journey to Mecca in disguise, in a time when non-Muslims were forbidden access on pain of death.
Burton also made the now famous journey with John Hanning Speke as the first Europeans to visit the great lakes of Africa in search of the source of the Nile. His works and letters extensively criticize colonial policies of the British Empire. Burton, the son of an army officer and a wealthy squire’s daughter, had been a captain in the army of the East India Company serving in India, and later briefly in the Crimean War.While in the army, he kept a large menagerie of tame monkeys in the hope of learning their language, accumulating 60 words.
Burton embodied this idea of becoming an Oriental.He had his own name, he spoke the languages. In order to make himself darker, he would dye his skin with henna. He was one of the very few Europeans who was able to go on Hajj and perform Hajj. He memorized a quarter of the Quran. He went so far as to self circumcise himself to ensure that he would pass authentically as a Muslim.
His 7 years in India gave Burton a familiarity with the customs and behaviour of Muslims and prepared him to attempt the Hajj. It was this journey, undertaken in 1853, which made Burton most famous.
To explain his slightly strange accent, he would say he was Abdullah and was half Iranian, and half Arab He spoke,Persian, Farsi, and Arabic with multiple dialects. It was said that when one Arab guessed who he was drew his revolver and shot him announcing to his fellow pilgrims that, “This man was a thief and trying to steal from me.”
In May 1854, Burton again, funded by the Royal Geographical Society, travelled to Aden in preparation for his Somaliland, which would take him via the Ethiopian city of Harar.
According to Burton, “A tradition exists that with the entrance of the first White Christian, Harar will fall.” With Burton’s entry, the “Guardian Spell” would be broken. In January 1855, Burton made it to Harar and was graciously met by the Emir. Burton stayed in the city for 10 days. The journey back was plagued by lack of supplies. Burton wrote that he almost died of thirst.
On another trip to Somaliland, Burton’s party was attacked by a 200-strong group of Somali Warriors. In the ensuing fight, one of Burton’s companions was killed and fellow explorer John Speke, and with whom Burton would mount several expositions, was captured and wounded in 11 places before he managed to escape.Burton was impaled with a javelin, the point entering one cheek and exiting the other. This wound left a noticeable scar that can be easily seen on portraits and photographs. He was forced to make his escape with the weapon still transfixing his cheek.
In 1856, the Royal Geographical Society funded another expedition for Burton and John Speke, an exploration of the then utterly unknown Lake Regions of Central Africa, which would end in controversy.
After an arduous journey plagued by sickness and other misfortunes that took almost 2 years, the two explorers who become separated from the expedition, returned to London withSpeke announcing first that he had discovered Lake Victoria, the source of the Nile.
The two became bitter rivals, culminating with Speke being shot dead by his own gun on a hunting trip a day before a grand debate between the two on the controversy.
In 1868, Burton was appointed as the British consul in Damascus, an ideal post for someone with Burton’s knowledge of the region and customs. England wanted to know what was going on in the Levant, another chapter in The Great Game.
However, the area was in turmoil, because of the ongoing tensions between Christian,Jewish, and Muslim populations. In 1860, there’d been a violent and bloody uprising by Muslims in Damascus, fearing growing European and Christian influence, and thousands of Christians had been killed.
Burton did his best to keep the peace and resolve the situation, but this sometimes led him into trouble, and the posting ended after just 3 years. Burton was reassigned in 1872, to the port city of Trieste in Austria-Hungary.
A broken man, but was never particularly content with his post, but it required a little work, and allowed him the freedom to write and travel. Burton died in Trieste of a heart attack in 1890. The couple are buried in a tomb in the shape of a Bedouin tent, in a small churchyard in southwest London.
The coffins of Sir Richard and Lady Burton can be seen through a window at the rear of the tent, which could be accessed by a short fixed ladder.
Burton was a controversial and divisive character. His obscure grave site, perhaps mirrored by the fact that his co-explorer-cum-adversary, John Speke, had an obelisk erected for his achievements in London’s Kensington Gardens.
In Britain, with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the Mediterranean was connected to the Red Sea, joining the Occident to the Orient. The Middle East became a lifeline for the British Empire, making travel to India a key part of Britain’s worldwide economic influence easier than ever. Egyptomania had acquired a political dimension, that in the coming decades, would shape how the Victorians viewed their presence in the Eastern Mediterranean.
British occupation extended south into Sudan, resulting in the Mahdi Wars in Sudan. A Muslim uprising, led by the self-proclaimed Mahdi, led to the killing of the British Consul General Gordon in Khartoum and the invasion by British troops to quell the uprising, making a reputation of British military commander, the then later Lord Kitchener.
The unofficial occupation of Egypt by the British in 1882 meant the country, in every part of its culture and history, began to figure prominently in the minds of politicians and commentators. To the Victorians, it must have seemed that, more than they could ever imagine, the destinies of Egypt and Britain were intertwined.
Years later, in the 1920s, the seeds of Egypt-mania planted by the Victorians would reap a rich harvest when Howard Carter discovered the tomb of the Egyptian King, Tutankhamen. The discovery captured the imagination of the world, triggering an explosion of interest, even more powerful than the one which had swept 19th century Britain. Victorians had established an obsession that continued into the next century. Their legacy was an obsession with the beauty, history, and death found in Ancient Egypt.
This fascination was embodied in the story of T.E. Lawrence, the famous Lawrence of Arabia, an archaeologist and orientalist who took up the Arab cause during World War I. As a student, Lawrence was fascinated by the Crusades, visiting the region and its historic medieval fortresses and crusader castles, including the most famous, Krak des Chevaliers in today’s Syria.
When World War I broke out, Lawrence enlisted. As he could speak Arabic, he was offered a post in the intelligence service based in Cairo.
Lawrence soon found himself on the front lines of an old-style war fought on horseback across the Middle East, but particularly in Jordan and what was then Palestine.
The Ottoman Empire had governed the Middle East for centuries, and as it collapsed after Turkey’s defeat in World War I, the Arab world found itself embroiled in nationalistic struggles against victorious European powers, France, and England, looking to flex their colonial muscles.
The British were very keen on securing Palestine, Iraq as part of the strategic system which defended India. The French, looking back to the crusades, believed they had a historic right to Syria.
Lawrence, in his role as a chief strategist and soldier on the ground, played a key role in drawing up these plans.
After the war, Lawrence lived duel life – remaining in the forces but indulging his love of motorbikes during the week and a higher-society social life in London at the weekend. In many ways,Lawrence was the ultimate orientalist- explorer, artist, empire builder, spy. Lawrence had died young in the early 1930s, at the age of just 46, soon after a motorcycle accident. Churchill saw him as a key to running Britain’s emerging, and ultimately world-beating intelligence services as World War II approached.Ironically, it was a war that would ultimately change Imperial Britain’s vision of the Middle East forever.
Destination: Middle East and North Africa / England / France/ Switzerland/ Germany / Scotland
