Great Explorers: The 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 spies, empire builders and artists who have left us with great depictions -often idealised – of life in what seemed a foreign and exotic world.

In this episode of Empire Builders, we profile the German explorer, Ulrich Jasper Seetzen and Swiss explorer, Johann Ludwig   Burkhardt, who was the first European to discover the ancient sites of Petra in Jordan and Abu Simbel in Egypt. We also profile the   controversial and unique English explorer Richard Burton, who was one of the first Europeans to visit Mecca. And we look at the work of explorer artists such as France’s Eugene Delacroix and Jean-Leon Gerome and soldier explorers such as T, E Lawrence, the famous Lawrence of Arabia.

In more recent times the depictions of these explorers 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.

Certainly, the roots of Orientalism can be found in the colonial world of competing European empires in the 18th and 19th centuries- an era where there was intense geopolitical rivalry known as The Great Game. In the 21st centuries the same misunderstandings and rivalries can still inflict the cultures of both Oriental and Occidental worlds, exposed in the explorations of European adventurers 200 years ago.