Search results for ""Author Neil Cooke""

Members of the Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near East (ASTENE), founded in 1997, continue to research, hold international conferences, and publish books and essays in order to reveal the lives, journeys and achievements of these less well-known men and women who have made such a contribution to the present day historical and geographical knowledge of this region of the world and who have also given us a better understanding of its different peoples, languages and religions. The men and women from the past who are written about in this volume are a mixture of the incredibly rich or the very poor, and yet they have one thing in common, the bravery to tackle an adventure into the unknown without the certainty they would ever return home to their families. Some took up the challenge as part of their job or to create a new business, one person travelled to learn how to create and manage a harem at his house in London, others had no choice because as captives in a military campaign they were forced to make journeys into Ottoman controlled lands not knowing exactly where they were, yet every day they were looking for an opportunity to escape and return to their homes, while hoping the next person they met would guide them towards the safest route. Apart from being brave, many of these men and women travellers have something else in common: they and others they encountered have left a collective record describing their travels and their observations about all manner of things. It is these forgotten pioneers who first gathered the facts and details that now fill numerous modern guidebooks, inflight magazines and websites.

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Long distance travel and mass tourism are not recent phenomena. This collection of papers from the 2015 ASTENE Conference in Exeter demonstrates that over the centuries many individuals and groups of people have left the safety of their family home and travelled huge distances both for adventure and to learn more about other peoples and places. Some travels were to help establish trade routes, while others were for personal pleasure and knowledge. Many of those who travelled have left little or no record but in a few cases their travels can be determined from the brief encounters they had with other travellers who noted these chance meetings in their journals and diaries, which they later used to inform and write for publication accounts of their own travels and impressions. The 18 papers in this rich and varied collection include: finding the lost diary of a member of the Prussian scientific expedition to Egypt of 1842-45 that was hiding in ‘plain sight’ among other books; the illustrated journal of a Croatian travelling through Egypt, Nubia and Sudan in 1853-4 and the hardships endured; the competition between Officers of the East India Company to find the fastest trade routes through Syria between India and the Red Sea; and identifying the Dutch artist who made paintings of Constantinople and later travelled to India before joining the Bombay Artillery as a Lieutenant-fireworker. All 18 papers are the product of hours of careful research by their authors among original manuscripts and books tracked down in archives, libraries and private collections around the world.

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