PREPARE yourself to be a nomad as you embark on the charabanc journey through this intriguing book. Besides entering a world of nomads, you will be in the company of just one more. Allan Chapman gives due warning that shock absorbers may be essential: “It may appear curious that a book entitled The Victorians and the Holy Land should begin with the Greek classical writers . . . and a fourth-century nun, pilgrim and traveller Egeria, and conclude with . . . Cecil B. DeMille.”
In 14 chapters, the book does do just that, beginning with Herodotus, whom the author labels “the first tourist” and for whom the pyramids were as old as Herodotus is to us — some 2000 years in each case. In the early days of travellers and pilgrims in Egypt, there was widespread belief that the pyramids were the granaries that stored the grain during the famines of Jacob’s son Joseph.
Swiftly, we move on to Sultan Mohammed ll’s conquest of Constantinople in 1453, generally seen as the start of the Renaissance and the spread of knowledge which it presaged. The extraordinary spread of the Ottoman Empire is catalogued, and Ottomans even arrive in south-western England. Thomas Pellow was captured in 1715, and, a century before, in 1627, a rogue Dutchman led Ottomans to capture Lundy Island.
The catalogue of adventures and questing scholars is far too numerous to note here, but some were more remarkable than others. Giovanni Battista Belzoni, born in 1778 the son of a Paduan barber, first planned to be a monk, but this 6′ 7″ genial giant became first a circus strongman, then a water engineer, and finally, as Chapman puts it, the first Egyptologist. Nelson’s victory at the Battle of the Nile caused many Frenchmen to be “exiled” in Egypt, and one of them led a search for an ancient “Suez Canal”. Then followed the experimental physicist Thomas Young’s study of the Rosetta Stone in the early 19th century, contributing to the earliest modern understanding of demotic and hieroglyphic script. But our charabanc ventures further on, toward the Fertile Crescent, where Nimrud rises from the desert sands.
The Americans Edward Robinson and Eli Smith preceded the journeyings of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (eventually Dean of Westminster), who accompanied the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), exploring the “Bible lands” and founding the Palestine Exploration Fund. Charles Piazzi Smyth, in effect, founded pyramidology at about the same time as Daniel Dunglas Home was exploring Spiritualism and levitating.
Into the 19th century, and we encounter the Derbyshire Baptist printer Thomas Cook, who would revolutionise tourism, to the horror of the gentry. Finally, we move on to mummies and the founding of the first public museum, the Ashmolean in Oxford, in 1683. Biblical art and music, alongside William Fox Talbot’s pioneering photography, capture the culture and landscapes of the Levant.
In such an exciting series of voyages and journeys, there are understandably some odd omissions; so David Roberts’s evocative pictures of Palestine do not appear. But this is a captivating and compelling volume: Disney-like at times, but never boring. It is well worth jumping on the coach.
The Rt Revd Stephen Platten is a former Bishop of Wakefield.
The Victorians and the Holy Land: Adventurers, tourists and archaeologists in the lands of the Bible
Allan Chapman
Eerdmans £26.99
(978-0-8028-8409-1)
Church Times Bookshop £24.29
