During the 18th and 19th centuries, many travellers aimed to record their travels through Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Levant and Turkey by collecting souvenirs and mementos of places they had visited. This natural inclination took many different guises: from innocent activities such as making diaries and sketches, gathering academic knowledge or taking photographs, to acquiring souvenirs, very often antiquities. Other, more unscrupulous, travellers undertook journeys specifically to ‘collect’ antiquities to form the basis of museum collections or to profit by re-selling them. Souvenirs and New Ideas explores the human desire to retain the memory of a journey by ‘collecting objects’ with a series of essays examining the motivation of a variety of different travellers ranging from intrepid female solo travellers to European royalty. The acquisitions of these individuals ranged from tales of folklore and academic knowledge to the wholesale looting of Egyptian antiquities. Although the habit of ‘collecting antiquities’ is deplored and condemned today, this volume sheds light on the attitudes behind the practice and seeks to strengthen our current beliefs about the value of cultural patrimony.

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Malta, the Lycian Marbles and the Tomb of the English Lady
• Chapter 2: Elsa Sophia von Kamphoevener, Baroness of Fairy Tales
• Chapter 3: Edward Libbey: An American Glass Magnate Collects in Egypt
• Chapter 4: Seeking the Collectors: Çanakkale Jugs in UK Collections
• Chapter 5: War and Peace and Travel and Writing: European Exploration in Egypt and the Sudan, 1798–1898
• Chapter 6: An Irish Woman in Egypt: The Travels of Lady Harriet Kavanagh
• Chapter 7: Jeremiah Colman: A Norfolk Traveller in Egypt
• Chapter 8: A Thousand and One Books: The Early Travel Literature of Ludwig Keimer
• Chapter 9: George Hoskins, Travels in Ethiopia and the History of Meroe
• Chapter 10: Fortunes of War: Egyptologists in Cairo during the Second World War
• Chapter 11: Waynman Dixon: In the Shadow of the Needle
• Chapter 12: Mrs William Grey and the Prince of Wales Coffins
• Chapter 13: Sir Robert Ainslie, Domenico Sestini and Luigi Mayer: A Case of Who Went Where, with Whom and When
• Chapter 14: John Madox: A Diligent Traveller and His Scattered Legacy
• Index
• Colour Plates