For thousands of years travellers wandered to, and spread out through, Egypt and the Near East, seeking trade, adventure and knowledge. For centuries travellers to - and from - the Near East carried knowledge with them and then carried home the new knowledge acquired in the region. And knowledge, as the Arabic proverb states, is light. The travels which are the subjects of these nine papers continue to represent the work of The Association for the Study of Travel in the Near East, which was set up to follow, study and record the experience of travel and travellers in the Near East. The book features travellers of great character. John Covel was in Constantinople in the 1670s where he became Chaplain and took away in his little-known diaries an extraordinary account of what it was like to be an Englishman in late 17th-century Greece and Asia Minor. James Rennell came to be considered as "one of the first geographers of this or any other age". He spent thirty years researching classical and modern sources on the geography of the Near East, including his splendidly intriguing study of the rate of travel by camels to establish distances.

• Cover
• Previous Volume
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• The Authors
• John Covel: A Levant Company Chaplain At Constantinople In The 1670s
• Depictions of Islam In Seventeenth-Century English Travel Accounts
• Saved From Pirates
• Willey Reveley And The Greek Revival: A Journey Through Italy, Egypt and Greece in the Years 1785 and 1786
• James Rennell And His Scientific World of Observation
• A Journey Through The Holy Land, 1820
• Death And Resurrection: The Renans in Syria (1860–61)
• Theodore Ralli’s Diary On His Travel To Athos (1885)
• Men In Skirts And How To Become Frank