Early travelers to Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Turkey and the Levant recorded and remembered their journeys by collecting or creating mementos of places they visited. This natural inclination took many guises, ranging from painting landscapes or, later, taking photographs to acquiring souvenirs, very often antiquities. The collection of antiquities, a controversial and usually illegal practice today, was in the 18th and 19th centuries not necessarily either, and many privately assembled collections now form the basis of major national museums.
Souvenirs and New Ideas explores the human desire to retain the memory of a foreign journey, in a series of essays that examine the collections of a variety of travelers, from intrepid female solo voyagers to European royalty. Their acquisitions included souvenirs ranging from Egyptian mummies and ancient artifacts, to paintings and sketches of places visited, to the raw material for books written at leisure, both scholarly and popular. In their desire to share with those at home some of what they had seen, these voyagers contributed to an understanding of societies little known at the time, and the stories of their travels continue to entrance.
1. Malta, the Lycian Marbles and the Tomb of the English Lady (Joseph Attard Tabone)
2. Elsa Sophia von Kamphövener, the Baroness of Fairy Tales (Cristina Erck)
3. Edward Libbey: An American Glass Magnate Collects in Egypt (Elaine Altman Evans)
4. Seeking the Collectors: Çanakkale Jugs in UK Collections (Elizabeth French)
5. War and Peace and Travel and Writing: European Exploration in Egypt and the
Sudan, 1798–1898 (Eamonn Gearon)
6. An Irish Woman in Egypt: the Travels of Lady Harriet Kavanagh (Emmet Jackson)
7. Jeremiah Colman: A Norfolk Traveller in Egypt (Faye Kalloniatis)
8. A Thousand and One Books: The Early Travel Literature of Ludwig Keimer (Isolde Lehnert)
9. George Hoskins, Travels in Ethiopia and the History of Meroe (Robert G. Morkot)
10. Fortunes of War: Egyptologists in Cairo during the Second World War (Hana Navrátilová)
11. Waynman Dixon: In the Shadow of the Needle (Ian Pearce)
12. Mrs William Grey and the Prince of Wales Coffins (Cynthia May Sheikholeslami)
13. Sir Robert Ainslie, Domenico Sestini and Luigi Mayer: A Case of Who Went
Where, with Whom and When (Brian J. Taylor)
14. John Madox: A Diligent Traveller and his Scattered Legacy (John H. Taylor)