Travelling Through Sinai: From the Fourth to the Twenty-First Century

Seated at the crossroads of Asia and Africa, and bounded by the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, Sinai has long attracted travelers to its ancient caravan routes and haunting landscapes. From early Christian pilgrims to medieval merchants and nineteenth-century Europeans on the Grand Tour, visitors to Sinai have frequently left written accounts of their experiences in this historic peninsula. In this wide-ranging anthology, Deborah Manley and Sahar Abdel-Hakim have collected dozens of accounts and observations from travelers who have written about Sinai, its people, its sights, and its historical and biblical landmarks. Starting with Egeria, a fourth-century Christian who relates her visit to Mt. Sinai and the Burning Bush, Traveling through Sinai offers a diverse collection of voices over the centuries. Among them are the German friar Felix Fabri, who visited in 1492, and nineteenth-century antiquarian William Flinders Petrie, giving his impressions of the Bedouins of the peninsula. French novelist Alexandre Dumas writes of meeting two monks in the desert carrying a letter signed by Napoleon, while others describe crossing the canal at Suez, the ancient inscriptions of Wadi Mukattab, and the harrowing experiences of desert travel. For many of the visitors included here, their ultimate destination was St. Catherine's monastery, a major site for Christian pilgrims since its founding in the fourth century. With an array of narratives from the writings of Procopius, Sir John Mandeville, John Lewis Burckhardt, Isabella Bird, Pierre Loti, Michael Haag, and others, Traveling through Sinai offers a varied portrait of this fabled peninsula that has drawn travelers and pilgrims to it for centuries.