A Description of the East, and Some other Countries.

£6,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A handsome copy of an essential work on Egypt and the Levant, from the library of the traveller and friend of Lord Byron, Sir John Hobhouse (1786-1869). Richard Pococke (1704-1765) was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and enjoyed a successful start to his ecclesiastical career before deciding to undertake a period of foreign travel in his late twenties. In 1733 he started out on the well-trodden path of the grand tour but carried on beyond its bounds, into the less visited Near East. From Alexandria (reached in September 1737), he explored Rosetta (Rashid), Dandarah, Luxor and Cairo, taking down descriptions, plans and sketches of, inter alia, the Sphinx, the pyramids at Giza and one of the staggering statues of Amenhotep III. He then pushed on to Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, where his attention was not only drawn to the seductive antiquity of Jerusalem and Baalbek but also the contemporary urban life of Damascus and Aleppo. In Damascus he was impressed by the grandeur of the Umayyad Mosque and the “remarkably pleasant” (v.II, p.122) coffee houses, and found many aspects of Aleppo to his liking, such as air “so fine, that the people lie on the tops of their houses during the summer season” (v.II, p.151). His westward journey included stops at Cyprus, Crete, parts of Asia Minor and Greece. The first volume of A Description of the East …, focusing on Egypt, was published a year after his return to England in 1743. Its informational richness, geographical novelty and

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