Souvenirs and New Ideas: Travel and Collecting in Egypt and the Near East.

• Author: Beckman, Gary
• Position: Book review

Souvenirs and New Ideas: Travel and Collecting in Egypt and the Near East. Edited by DIANE FORTENBERRY. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2013. Pp. xi + 196, 17 pits. $50 (paper), [Distributed by Casemate Academic, Oakville, Conn.]

The investigation of the social history of European exploration of Egypt and western Asia from the early modern period onward and the assembly of collections of antiquities from this region are the focus of the activities of the Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near East. This volume contains fourteen of the papers presented at its ninth biennial conference, held in Oxford in July 2011. Although many of the contributors are amateur scholars, the quality of the essays is generally high. From a perusal of the articles and the numerous excellent illustrations, the reader learns much about the reconnaissance of Islamic lands by Western soldiers, diplomats, scholars, artists, and gentry. The wide range of the contributions will be evident from those which this reviewer found most intriguing:

Joseph Attard Tabone ("Malta, the Lycian Marbles and the Tomb of the English Lady") describes how, in the mid-nineteenth century when Britain ruled the seas, the island of Malta served as a transshipment station for adventurer Charles Fellows when he dispatched to the British Museum on ships of the Royal Navy the quite substantial monuments that he removed from Xanthos. One of the engineers who assisted him in Anatolia, inspired by the Lycian rock tombs he had seen there, had a similar facade carved into a cliff face in a Maltese wadi. The origins of this folly having been lost over the decades, the locals now say that it marks the spot where an Englishwoman died after falling from her horse.

In "Elsa Sophia von Kamphoevener, Baroness of Fairy Tales," Cristina Erck demonstrates that the "Baroness" of her title, in reality the daughter of a German military adviser to the Ottoman army, did not...