SAMPLE PAGES - Shifting Horizons : Observations from a Ride Through the Syrian Desert and Asia Minor

Archive Archaeology 1

archive archaeology

This is a dedicated series for the publication of monographs and edited collections exploring archival material relating to archaeological and historical materials across the centuries. The aims of this series are twofold.

Firstly, materials and excavation reports can be found in museums and archives around the world, but they are largely unpublished, frequently inaccessible, and typically uncited in scholarship, despite often holding crucial information on sites as well as objects. This series therefore aims to make this material available to readers for the first time, in combination with new research materials and wider discussions around the archive material. Secondly, in the context of wider discussions about handling and disseminating cultural heritage, the series looks to promote research that explores the methodological and theoretical discussions around such material. Combined, these two approaches provide a unique forum for new research into archival and legacy data.

1

Shifting Horizons Observations from a Ride Through the Syrian Desert and Asia Minor A Translation of Johannes Elith Østrup’s ‘Skiftende horizonter’

Østrup, trans. by Spencer

Cover image: Johannes Elith Østrup on the Arab horse he had ridden from Damascus all the way home to Denmark. Taken in Denmark, 1894. Image reproduced from Østrup’s own collection of photographs, as published in Skiftende horizonter: skildringer og iagttagelser fra et ridt gennem ørkenen og Lille-Asien (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag 1894).

ARC

Shifting Horizons

Johannes Elith Østrup (1867–1938), son of a Danish farmer, philologist of Turkish and Semitic languages, and later Vice Chancellor of Copenhagen University, spent 1891–1893 travelling by horse around Syria, Lebanon, and Anatolia. Unlike most European travellers, his language skills allowed him to chat with locals in cafés, stay in people’s homes, and travel with the Bedouin.

A curious young man, Østrup travelled with eyes, ears, and mind open to the unknown, and recorded his journey in this lively travelogue, Skiftende horizonter (1894). His writing offers a vivid account of his time in the region, and dwells with equal interest on both the region’s broader political, ethnic, and religious struggles, and the day-to-day concerns of those who lived there.

Now, for the first time, this text is available to English-speaking readers thanks to this translation by Cisca Spencer, Østrup’s great granddaughter and a former Australian diplomat. With a foreword by Rubina Raja, Professor of Classical Archaeology at Aarhus University, together with Østrup’s own collection of photographs and a new map, this volume captures all the charm and enthusiasm of the original in bringing this nineteenth-century travelogue to a modern readership.

by

cisca spencer foreword by rubina raja

Shifting Horizons Observations from a Ride through the Syrian Desert and Asia Minor Published in 1894 as

Skiftende horizonter: Skildringer og iagttagelser fra et ridt gennem ørkenen og Lille-Asien by

Johannes Østrup Translated by

Cisca Spencer

Archive Archaeology General Editor Professor Rubina Raja, Aarhus Universitet Advisory Board Professor Jennifer Baird, Birkbeck, University of London Dr Olympia Bobou, Aarhus Universitet Dr Lisa R. Brody, Yale University Art Gallery Dr Jon Frey, Michigan State University Professor Christopher Hallett, University of California, Berkeley Dr Fotini Kondyli, University of Virginia Dr Amy Miranda, Aarhus Universitet

VOLUME 1

Acknowledgements

T

his book would not have seen the light of day without the help and encouragement of Prof. Rubina Raja, of Aarhus University’s Cen­ tre for Urban Network Evolutions and the Depart­ ment of Classical Studies. She was a leading organizer of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek’s exhibition The Road to Palmyra (2019–2020), in which the work of my grandfather Johannes Østrup was mentioned. great-­ She un­stintingly gave me much professional and practi­ cal advice as we got closer to publication, despite the difficulties of the ­pandemic-induced lockdown in Den­ mark, and the sorrows that civil war in Syria caused — and still cause — for her own work there. I am deeply grateful for her belief in the project.

Ross Burns, friend and former colleague in the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, generously advised on such tricky subjects as tribal and place names in the book. Names were transliterated into Danish by Østrup and some would have been impossi­ ble for me to track down in recognized English versions without him. Ross’s broad expertise was always available to me, and he tactfully helped me to avoid some glaring mistakes, as well as correcting many inaccurate c­ aptions

to the photos that Østrup included in the original.

Importantly, he made the wonderful map marking the route that Østrup followed through Lebanon, Syria and Anatolia. There were no maps in the 1894 Danish pub­ lication, but Ross’s map does much to bring to life the English version of these travels of 130 years ago.

Despite my having no expertise except a command of Danish and English, my children, Caroline, Thomas, and Yannick patiently bullied me to tackle this work, including during a memorable evening in a hotel garden in Aurangabad, India. They solved my innumerable IT problems along the way. It was for them that I began the translation, feeling that they would be interested in this part of their Danish family history, and I hope that they will indeed enjoy the finished product.

Finally, thank you to those friends whose eyes lit up as they heard Østrup’s story of times long past and places far removed from Australia. They listened patiently as my enthusiasm caused dinners to burn and guests to go hungry, they asked for copies to read for themselves, and they had faith in me to get his story to them.

Cisca Spencer November 2021

Making the Danish Engagement in Near Eastern Research Available to a Broader Public On the Value of an English Translation of Johannes Elith Østrup’s Skiftende Horizonter from 1894

T

his volume is the first volume in Archive Archaeo­ logy, a new academic series that was established to cover a wide range of aspects connected to archival material stemming from fieldwork, travel accounts, and museum archives as well as connected to collections or even objects. The aim behind this series is to bring this important material — material that has hitherto often been left uncommented upon, unpublished, and therefore outside of discussion about how material evidence has been, and still is, curated — to the forefront and to acknowledge its importance as a scholarly source in its own right.

Often the reasons underlying the lack of attention paid to archival materials include a lack of time, difficulties in accessing the material, and lack of available funding to support such research. Archives, which might first come into existence together with collections and then expand over time, or be established during an excavation, which could last several years, often end up in boxes in museums, university offices, or dig houses and never see the light of day once a project has ended or a collection displayed. This practice is now changing — certainly there has been a shift in the museum world in particular over the past few decades — but nonetheless there remains much work to be done with such archives. This is particularly so because archives often constitute an important ‘grey’ literature that is of use not only for primary researchers, but also for the wider academic community as a whole, and even, as in the case of this volume, which presents a text by Johannes Elith Østrup in English for the first time, to an even broader readership.

By addressing and working on archival material, we thus can also make important knowledge available to a larger community.

Funding is another issue that has hindered scholarly research into archival material. Archives often require curation; they need to be understood, commented on, and contextualized. However, since research is often only considered ‘original’ when it is based on wholly new empirical evidence — at least within the field of archaeo­ logy — it is often difficult to find foundations willing to fund projects that focus exclusively on archival material. Through the foundation of the Archive Archaeo­logy series, I hope we can make a contribution to changing peoples’ views of archives and make a contribution to theoretical and methodo­logical discussions about what we can gain from studying archival materials of various kinds.

History often repeats itself, and reading historical accounts might therefore enhance our understanding of the past and inform our view of it as well as our view of our own times and, in turn, influence the ways in which we might conduct ourselves in the future. However, we often tend to forget about the value of such sources.

Furthermore, sources written in languages that are not read by many today also tend to be overlooked, both by modern scholarship and the general interested reader.

Therefore, it was a great pleasure when Cisca Spencer, the great-granddaughter of Johannes Elith Østrup, contacted me to say that she had translated Østrup’s travel account Skiftende Horizonter into English and was looking for a publication platform. Her email came at an opportune point in time, as I had also just founded the present series Archive Archaeo­logy.

The account by Østrup was originally written and published in Danish in 1894, and has over the years informed my own research on Syria, in particular on

xii

Making the Danish Engagement in Near Eastern Research Available to a Broader Public

Palmyra.1 Recently, together with colleagues, I have published a translation with commentary of the 1928 Danish publication by Harald Ingholt, Studier over Palmyrensk Skulptur. Due to his own work in Palmyra in the 1920s and 1930s, Harald Ingholt was intrinsically connected to Østrup and knew of his work and referred to it in some of his writings.2 I have also read and published on Østrup’s work in the Syrian Desert where he was one of the earliest travellers to map parts of the desert and to describe certain of Palmyra’s monuments and the general state of its antiquities.3 Østrup also initiated the acquisition of further pieces for the already existing collection of Palmyrene sculpture in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, a collection that I recently republished in connection with the exhibition The Road to Palmyra.4 So while the scope of Østrup’s writings go way beyond Palmyra, my engagement with them has primarily been related to my research on Palmyra. However, Østrup’s Skiftende Horizonter describes his travel on horseback through Lebanon, Syria, and Anatolia to Copenhagen and brings to life times gone by.

Any reader with an interest in historiography and past writings in general will be aware that the language in the past — even only a little over a century ago — was not sensitive to issues which we view very differently today. Østrup was writing at a time when Western travellers, mostly men, very often considered themselves to be more important and better educated, and with attitudes that were more ‘advanced’ then the local populations whom they encountered on their trips. Such an attitude can be identified in numerous places in Østrup’s manu­script, and in this volume Spencer has dealt with the translation as delicately as possible, supplementing Østrup’s comments with footnotes, and she has done a solid job of contextualizing the author’s viewpoint.

While we today have entirely different views of how to travel, conduct fieldwork, and behave as scholars and visitors working with, or experiencing, cultural heritages that are different to our own cultural spheres, we also cannot, and should not, eradicate the ways in which Østrup 1894.

On Ingholt: Raja and Sørensen 2015a; 2015b; Raja 2019a; 2019b; 2021.

3 Bobou and others (eds) 2021; Raja and Sørensen 2019; Raja 2015; 2016. For Østrup’s further writings on his travels and findings: Østrup 1895.

4 Nielsen and Raja (eds) 2019; Raja 2019c. Østrup was a driving force behind the acquisition of the following pieces: (inv. nos) 1130, 1147, 1149, 1150, 1152, 1153, 1155, 1156, 1157, 1159, 1160, and 1161.

1 2

earlier attitudes were communicated. Only through addressing the trajectories embedded in the original linguistic choices might we also learn how to do things differently today. It is the intention that Archive Archaeo­ logy, for which this volume constitutes the first in the series, will, over time, engage with such issues more fully through the publication of a wider-range of archival materials relating to fieldwork expeditions and archaeo­ logical excavations across many regions of the world and over numerous centuries.

In today’s rapidly changing world, Østrup’s descriptions of countries and regions, many of which are today zones of conflict and war, bring knowledge to us about the rich cultural heritage and history of these regions, and therefore it is with pleasure that I welcome Cisca Spencer’s translation of her great-grandfather’s adventurous travel account. I hope that this book, in turn, will contribute new knowledge about the regions described, thus inciting new research and new interests in a number of places and societies. I thank Cisca Spencer for entrusting this publication to Archive Archaeo­logy.

Rubina Raja Aarhus University, Centre for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet) and Department of Classical Studies rubina.raja@cas.au.dk

Shifting Horizons

Foreword

T

hese observations of my stay in Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor in 1891–1893 should not be taken as a travelogue; this should be clear enough to the reader from their content. I confess I have never been able to be much interested in literal travelogues, and what Heine says about travel descriptions of Italy, namely, that they are as dull as it is possible to be (perhaps just as dull as writing them), can just as well be said about travel descriptions of other countries, at least as far as I am concerned.

I have therefore tried to describe not so much what I saw as what I heard. It is here, I believe, where there is a distinction between a travelling researcher and a straightforward tourist. What I sought was first and foremost the people themselves; to live with them so as to understand their social and historical context, with my main objective being to talk to them and to learn about their way of thinking. Only when I compared my observations with those of other travellers, and also with evidence from the past, could I hope to understand what I observed and how the past had led to the present. This is why I have given some limited geo­g raphical and historical information in this book.

My book does not start with anything systematic (as my title hints at). I did not set out to describe Egypt: so many capable writers have done this already that I did not think I could add anything new. Only occasionally did I have any genuinely new insights in Egypt, as opposed to in Syria and Asia Minor. For that reason I have dwelt more on my stay among the Arab Bedouins, where I believe I could indeed bring some new insights into this unique group of people and their way of life.

What we experience in our travels does, of course, depend greatly on chance: the observations of any given traveller do not necessarily provide a thorough description of a country’s life. But I believe I did observe a good deal of what is most characteristic of the Levant. I hope that my book can add to our knowledge of these ancient but also young, well-known but still unknown, societies, and that readers will come to feel and understand the enthusiasm and love which binds me to this wonderful part of the world.

Johannes Østrup 20 August 1894

Map 1. Østrup’s route through Lebanon, Syria and Anatolia, through to Belgrade (map by Ross Burns 21 @www.monumentsofsyria.com).

For details of the area in the dashed box, see the map on pp. 54–55 in this volume.

Chapter 1 two nights, and my local friends swore that I would never get to Beirut alive.

Indeed I would not recommend that anyone travel around Lebanon at night, but only because you then miss out on the wonderful views from the road. These views are best seen coming from inland and when you reach the last height, a mighty panorama spreads out below you. Long irregular valleys, with steep walls and lush vegetation at the bottom, cut through the mountains, which get lower and lower towards the west. The slopes have been cultivated by a hard-working population. Lebanon is mainly populated by Maronite Christians, and by Druze who until a few decades ago were the terror of both Christians and Turks.

The French road from Beirut to Damascus runs across a broad valley and up on to the other side across the Anti-Lebanon Mountains’ wild crags, but without going near those points that are most interesting to painters, historians, and tourists. So I chose a different route, avoiding the French road, which leads to the cedar forests and to Baalbek.

There are only a few left of these mighty trees. Just as western civilizations clear away a region’s characteristic culture and society, so they also rob their landscapes of their jewels. Now it is not as in King Solomon’s times, when the majestic crowns of these trees were the pride of all the slopes in Lebanon. Then the mountains rang to the sound of King Hiram’s axe, and long trains of oxen dragged the trunks down to Jaffa. Now there is only a little copse of a few hundred cedars of Lebanon, about halfway between Beirut and Tripoli, a little peculiarity in today’s Syria, a heritage preserved like the giant redwoods in Yellowstone and bison in Poland.

As with so much in the Levant, nobody takes any interest in the living except as a heritage of the past.

Whether it is the trees in the mountains, or Baalbek’s pillars down in the valley, everything is the same, except that it is different eras of the past that are evoked: even

7

Figure 2. Cedars of Lebanon.

in Baalbek, where several civilizations have succeeded one another and all have left clear traces.

Baalbek is one of the many towns which in classical times were honoured with the name Heliopolis, city of the sun, and everywhere seems pervaded by a glow of the past’s glory. Few of antiquity’s architectural remnants manage to combine both the harmonious and the colossal as here amid Baalbek’s temples, whose pillars gleaming even from afar rise proudly above the fruitful olive groves surrounding today’s city. Almost all the antique temples are in the one spot, the citadel, flanked on one side by the so-called cyclopean wall, the gigantic stones of which are the despair of today’s archaeo­logists and engineers. The wall is put together at the lowest level with ashlar (finely cut, small, regular stones). The stones get bigger the higher the wall rises, until at about 20 feet high the stones can be more than fifty feet long, so that the whole length of the wall may contain only three stones. There has been much debate about how in classical times it was even possible to build these colossal structures, which today’s engineers with all the technical means at their disposal can barely manage. We saw how difficult it had been to raise the Obelisk on the Place de la Concorde, while ancient Egyptians had raised many similar monuments. I recall that when travelling through

8

Chapter 1

The ruins of the Sun Temple and Jupiter’s Temple are not from the classical period’s glory times, but there are few places where classical Greece’s art of building makes a greater impression than here. Everything is concentrated in one spot, is relatively well preserved, and the contrast with the modern Turkish town is so strong that not even on the Parthenon have I been so beguiled as here in Baalbek by the powerful harmony of classical architecture.

It is odd that so much has been preserved: few cities have seen so much war as Baalbek, this idyllic spot by the source of the clear waters of the Orontes River, which seems chosen to be Figure 3. Outlook over temple ruins at Baalbek. an earthly paradise. Here a Byzantine force fought its Asia Minor, I came across a Dutch engineer in Kiutahia,7 last desperate battle against the advancing Arabs, and with whom I visited some Roman ruins, who said somehere the Caliphs’ border forces skirmished endlessly thing very interesting about this question. He said it was with hostile Bedouins. In the times of the Umayyads,8 not true that in classical times they had used some nowBaalbek was still a significant city, and the oldest of the lost techniques, but that we had to assume that they used Arab poets, Amr ibn Kulthum proudly tells of forays to simple means, such as ropes and levers, in other ways. the wine-rich town of Baalbek.9 Later Baalbek became Thus he thought that, in order to lift great weights, they the seat of Druze leaders, and an apple of discord first might have wet the ropes to make them shrink, a story among the Druze themselves, and then between them we know from the raising of the Obelisk in Rome. While and the Turks, until the latter gained victory. Baalbek, a wet rope loses about a quarter of its strength, this loss City of the Sun, became a miserable hole that has kept can be compensated for by using more ropes. My friend nothing glorious other than its past. the engineer thought that the ancient builders might We spent a whole day probing around the Citadel also have used the tension achieved by twisting ropes, walls and columns, carrying long sticks because of the where the tension is great compared to the force needed many large snakes living in the crevices. Only when it got to twist the rope, and it may be that those ancient builddark did we head back to the hotel which an enterprising ers indeed used this technique more than is the case now.

Greek has built here in the middle of the plain. We met We cannot with certainty know anything about this, an old Arab there, one of Baalbek’s oldest inhabitants, and these massive buildings from ancient times make an even stronger impression as a result. Then, when you 8 The Umayyads were the first Muslim dynasty of the Caliphate, get up on to the citadel itself and come into the ancient founded in Damascus in ad 661. It was driven out by the Abbasids in Sun Temple, one admires the skill with which these ad 750, although a remnant was resurrected in ad 756 in Cordoba, mighty shapes are subject to a shared law of harmony. Spain, and continued to rule there until the eleventh century.

Amr ibn Kulthum (ad 526–584) was a poet and head of the Taghlib tribe in pre-Islamic Arabia.

9

7

Kütahya, in central Anatolia.

Chapter 1

9

who had served King Milan of Serbia,10 and since then has entertained all foreign visitors with tales of the magnanimous king and what a splendid man he had been. What interested me much more than his paeans to the Serbian ex-king was that this old Arab had a rich trove of stories about old Baalbek. Then I knew what I had to do: I began with lavish praise of King Milan, which put the old man in great good humour, then I called for coffee, and he began his stories.

He had a lot to say about ancient and newer Baalbek. He knew that ‘in olden times’ it had been called the City of the Sun, and that this was because its people worshipped the sun. But then Allah had sent his prophet Elias to spread the only true religion (for Islam, he said, had existed before the prophet Muhammad, indeed from the very beginning of time, but known only to a chosen few until Islam became a widespread creed.) My friend, with the Arab’s usual local patriotism, said that this was a true honour for his home city of Baalbek.

He also spoke about the valiant Druze leaders, who had been based in Baalbek, and their battles with the Turks. The Druze have always been the enemies of the Arabs as well as the Turks, but once they had been defeated, the Turk-hating Arabs had taken the side of the Druze, on the principle that the ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’, with the result that Druze emirs became national heroes also for the Arabs. Emir Selman in particular, who lived early this century, is still the model in Lebanon for every manly virtue. This Emir could set off on his horse with a copper penny between his knee and the saddle, and when he came home the penny would still be there clamped to the saddle, such was his prowess as a rider. It was Emir Selman’s tribe that had built the great palaces in Lebanon’s small towns, palaces that, like the dynasties themselves, have now crumbled to the ground. I once ran into a hackney driver in Damascus who was a remote descendant of Emir Selman, and you can find several privates in the Christian Governor’s militia whose ancestors were kings of those lands. Only in the province of Hauran, south of Damascus, do the

Druze have any political significance, and the local geo­ graphy there helps them maintain this independence.

I have only occasionally had the chance to spend time with Druze, and my efforts to learn something specific about their religion have been just as fruitless as those of earlier travellers. Strange as this seems, the religion of the Druze has to date been an unsolved mystery. The only thing we know with certainty is that it originated with the so-called Mad Caliph Hakim Biamrillah of Egypt, who declared himself a personification of God.11 This idea was then seized upon by a certain Hamza ibn Ali, who developed it as a whole system and spread it throughout Syria. According to the Druze, God has from time to time occupied the body of men, most recently this Caliph, who was the most perfect of these cases.

Everything that earlier founders of religions (Moses,

10 King Milan (1854–1901), Ruler of Serbia from 1868–1889, who was involved in the battle to gain Serbian independence from the Ottoman Empire.

11 Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah (ad 985–1021) was important in several Shia Ismaili religions, including the Druze, whose founder had proclaimed him as the incarnation of God in ad 1018.

Figure 4. Bettedin, the Druze emirs’ palace in Lebanon.

10 Je s u s , a n d Mu h a mm a d included) have taught are only allegories or precursors of the religion yet to come, and cannot therefore be considered whole or perfect.

Before the Day of Judgement, Caliph Hakim will return to earth and a dreadful punishment will be dealt out to all those who did not accept Druze teachings.

These are only a few sketches of the Druze faith, and nobody is yet clear about its philosophical or theo­l ogical underpinnings, because its practitioners keep it locked up in impenetrable secrecy. It even seems as if Druze laymen themselves know very little about their faith, such is the extent to which their leaders keep this to themselves. We know that the Druze have sacred books, but outsiders have not been able to get hold of more than a very few, since the Druze faithful try to keep themselves well away from any European ideas.

Some years later I met a man in Mersina in southern Turkey who was interested in these strange religions and in traces of ancient animism still found in parts of Syria, and he told me an interesting story. One of his friends had been very close to a Druze sheik and had hoped thereby to have found a source of knowledge about their mysterious religion. He asked for permission to witness their night-time ceremonies, and to his great surprise, this request had been granted. He came to the appointed place and found a circle of elderly sheiks, continually mumbling some incomprehensible prayers, and in the middle there was an open book. He dared to ask if he could see the book, and to his even greater surprise, given the general view that the Druze kept their faith strictly to themselves, this was also agreed to. His surprise finally knew no bounds when he saw that the book was a translation of the Bible into Arabic, printed in Beirut. The whole incident had been an elegant device by the Druze sheik to keep his religious secrets and yet not lose his friendship with a foreign scholar.

I have had similar experiences with the few Druze individuals I have met when they stayed for short periods in Damascus. They never directly refused a request

Chapter 1

Figure 5. A group of Druze.

for information, but if there was something that someone really wanted to hide, he improvised some absurd tale, presenting it with great aplomb. This is incidentally very common in the Middle East: people there see it as somehow impolite towards the questioner not to know or not to want to answer any given question, so they would rather directly lie, generally to provide an answer that they think the questioner wants to hear. How often has it happened to me, when riding around in unfamiliar country, that I have asked someone, ‘Isn’t it about an hour to the next village?’, only to get an answer like ‘Yes, effendi [a common term of politeness], maybe only half an hour on so magnificent a horse as yours.’ When I next met someone, I would ask ‘I expect it to be at least two hours to the next village’, I could be sure the answer would be ‘Yes, effendi, perhaps only an hour and a half ’.

Exactly this happened that evening with my old friend the storyteller in Baalbek, when I asked if he could tell me something about the Druze and their religion. Of course, he was immediately ready to dish up a whole lot, but when I said, ‘Wait a minute, this is something you are making up’, he was honest enough to admit it. In general, it pays always to be cautious in the East: how many misapprehensions have crept into European ideas just because some unwary traveller has believed the candid face which a local always puts on when lying most brazenly.

As I could not find out more about the Druze on that occasion, I left Baalbek accompanied by a young German

40

Chapter 2

Figure 28. The grand colonnade in Palmyra.

Figure 29. Palmyra, the northern enclosure wall of the Temple of Bel.

80

Chapter 5

Figure 42. Two Bedouin men.

ing under the leadership of Abdul Hamid, 5 one can hope that the great plan for a railway right across Asia Minor all the way to Baghdad will be realized within a few decades. This will bring parts of hitherto untouched Bedouin territory within reach of civilization. This is virgin territory, in parts very rich and ripe for settlement, which once the practical means are there could bring settlers very quickly. This is when the real battle for the Bedouins’ future will be determined.

Once the Bedouins come into direct contact with European civilization, whether sooner or later, one of two things will happen: either they will gradually adapt and take on elements of western civilization’s way of life, but also lose some of the things that make their own culture unique; or they will be antagonistic towards the new influences and fight with everything they can against them.

5

See Chapter 1 n. 44.

When you look back on the desert Arabs’ history and how it has shaped them, it is not hard to predict what might happen. Their most characteristic trait has been their isolation and their resistance, partly instinctive and partly quite deliberate, to any alien influence. It seems unlikely that they will let go of those barriers which they have kept up through thousands of years, even if pragmatism might suggest more flexibility as the better choice.

Their national pride, which lies behind the great gulf between the desert dwellers and the world outside, will maintain them in their belief, the more so as their isolation makes them unable to realize the true danger they are in. The desert has been their unchallenged kingdom for thousands of years, and only when it is too late, when the railway and the tele­graph has trapped them in these modern webs, will they realize that the new age is not like the times they lived in before.

The battle into which the Bedouins will undauntedly hurl themselves will, alas, have only one outcome. They

Archive Archaeology 1

archive archaeology

This is a dedicated series for the publication of monographs and edited collections exploring archival material relating to archaeological and historical materials across the centuries. The aims of this series are twofold.

Firstly, materials and excavation reports can be found in museums and archives around the world, but they are largely unpublished, frequently inaccessible, and typically uncited in scholarship, despite often holding crucial information on sites as well as objects. This series therefore aims to make this material available to readers for the first time, in combination with new research materials and wider discussions around the archive material. Secondly, in the context of wider discussions about handling and disseminating cultural heritage, the series looks to promote research that explores the methodological and theoretical discussions around such material. Combined, these two approaches provide a unique forum for new research into archival and legacy data.

1

Shifting Horizons Observations from a Ride Through the Syrian Desert and Asia Minor A Translation of Johannes Elith Østrup’s ‘Skiftende horizonter’

Østrup, trans. by Spencer

Cover image: Johannes Elith Østrup on the Arab horse he had ridden from Damascus all the way home to Denmark. Taken in Denmark, 1894. Image reproduced from Østrup’s own collection of photographs, as published in Skiftende horizonter: skildringer og iagttagelser fra et ridt gennem ørkenen og Lille-Asien (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag 1894).

ARC

Shifting Horizons

Johannes Elith Østrup (1867–1938), son of a Danish farmer, philologist of Turkish and Semitic languages, and later Vice Chancellor of Copenhagen University, spent 1891–1893 travelling by horse around Syria, Lebanon, and Anatolia. Unlike most European travellers, his language skills allowed him to chat with locals in cafés, stay in people’s homes, and travel with the Bedouin.

A curious young man, Østrup travelled with eyes, ears, and mind open to the unknown, and recorded his journey in this lively travelogue, Skiftende horizonter (1894). His writing offers a vivid account of his time in the region, and dwells with equal interest on both the region’s broader political, ethnic, and religious struggles, and the day-to-day concerns of those who lived there.

Now, for the first time, this text is available to English-speaking readers thanks to this translation by Cisca Spencer, Østrup’s great granddaughter and a former Australian diplomat. With a foreword by Rubina Raja, Professor of Classical Archaeology at Aarhus University, together with Østrup’s own collection of photographs and a new map, this volume captures all the charm and enthusiasm of the original in bringing this nineteenth-century travelogue to a modern readership.

by

cisca spencer foreword by rubina raja