#baedekers Egypt

[archivist-dragonfly]

Book 023

Baedeker’s Egypt 1929

Karl Baedeker

David & Charles 1974

A reprint of the 1929 edition of Baedeker’s Egypt. Lots of gorgeous maps.

[exploring-the-past]

Le Delta

Karl Baedeker (Firm). 1902. Egypt handbook for travellers, Leipsic : K. Baedeker. Map showing the Nile Delta.

[cinematic-literature]

Death on the Nile (2022) by Kenneth Branagh

Book title: Baedeker’s Egypt and the Sudan Handbook for Travellers (1929)

[l-egypte]

December 1, 2020 | Baedeker’s Egypt 

[Screenshot of a scanned page from the 4th edition of Egypt (1898)]

[vintagerpg]

Baedeker’s Handbooks are like RPG sourcebooks before anyone knew what an RPG sourcebook was. They are travel guides, produced primarily from the 1850s through the 1930s and then trickling off through the 70s. There are tons of them covering Europe, but the occasional volume tackles other northern hemisphere locales like India, Russia, Canada and the US. This one, as you can see, handles Egypt, circa 1914.

These things are exhaustive and not like modern travel guides. Only a small portion of Egypt’s 500 pages is devoted to the business of traveling (like steamer fares and hotel recommendations). Instead, you get a deeply researched book tackling history, geography, culture, customs, language, religion and politics. Most of the information is presented in firsthand travelogues, detailing the author’s journeys. Accompanying these are gorgeous fold-out maps, floor plans and other illustrations. Baedeker maps were so detailed that the Luftwaffe used the guidebook for Great Britain to formulate targets for bombing raids in 1942 – both sides referred to these as Baedeker Raids after a German official said, “We shall go out and bomb every building in Britain marked with three stars in the Baedeker Guide."

The Baedeker guides capture something essential about travel in the early 20th century. If you read a lot of mysteries about the period (or watch BBC adaptations), you’re sure to catch a glimpse or a passing reference to the guides at some point. That makes them well suited for Call of Cthulhu games. Chaosium’s regional sourcebooks seems to grasp a bit at the Baedeker style and I have seen Baedeker floor plans in Horror on the Orient Express. This book (which, judging from the notes written in the margins, actually made the trip to Egypt) was on the table during the Cairo chapter of my Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign (and the London guide for the London chapter as well) and I think it lent the proceedings a hint of verisimilitude. If I was running Orient Express in person, I’d have made a vague effort to have Baedeker’s for each stop.

[epaulesdegeantes]

Marie la Juive - La mère de l’alchimie - Micro-bio 18

Utilisé aussi bien dans les laboratoires et dans les cuisines, le bain-marie est un système simple pour chauffer de façon douce et uniforme. Mais pourquoi l’appelle-t-on bain-marie ? Et qui était la marie qui a donné son nom ?

Découvrez Marie la Juive, une alchimiste dont on ne sait pas grand chose si ce n’est qu’elle a décrit un certains nombres d'instrument nécessaire à l’alchimie et la chimie dont certains sont toujours utilisés (sous la même forme ou améliorés). 

Bibliographie :

Les + grandes femmes de la science par Jean C. Baudet (2014) Ed. La Boîte de Pandore

Ss pages wikipédia en français https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_la_Juive et en anglais https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_the_Jewess 

Musique par Aaron Kenny

Photos :

Marie la Juive, Wellcom Images (M0011828) - CC By -  https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/M0011828.html

Bain-Marie, schéma par Polimerek (2006) - CC By SA - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Laznia_laboratoryjna.svg

Carte d’Alexandrie extraite de Egypt and the Sûdân; handbook for travellers de  Karl Baedeker (1914) - Domaine Public - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Egypt_and_the_S%C3%BBd%C3%A2n;_handbook_for_travellers_(1914)_(14783598172).jpg

Bain-marie, extrait de Coelum philosophorum, seu De secretis naturae liber par Philippus Ulstadius (1528) - Domaine Public - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mary%27s_Bath_1528_detail_AQ9_(1).tif

Bain-marie à kérptakis extrait de Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs. Tome 1 par M. Berthelot (1887-1888), Gallica BNF - Domaine Public - https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k96492923/f188.item.zoom

L’atelier de l’alchimiste extrait de Beschreibung allerfürnemisten mineralischen Ertzt unnd Bergkwercks Arten par Lazarus Ercker (1594) - Domaine Public - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alchemists_Workshop_detail_from_Title_Page_AQ24_(3).tif

[seagull-astrology]

‘If you ask Google “when is Jamal Khashoggi’s birthday”, it will return October 13 1958.  Based on that, we created this chart using a sunrise birthtime and whole houses since we are working the dark.  Nothing odd about that but the chart is rather perplexing for him.  Obviously whatever we know about the journalist is either wrong or the date is; perhaps both.

The Facts on Jamal

What we know is that Jamal Khashoggi was born in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.  The Washington Post and the New York Times says nothing more, but of course his surname “Khashoggi” brings up connections to Adnan Khashoggi, the billionaire nuclear arms dealer.  Even with that information, both papers go silent.

Adnan Khashoggi’s first wife, Soraya in 1979 – she was born Sandra Daly in England (Image: Hulton Archive)

The India Times does give this background on him, but nothing on his relationships (October 6 2018 when Khashoggi went missing).

Khashoggi was a well-known journalist, used to rubbing shoulders with political elites. He became friends with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and had been close to Saudi royals. He spent years rising in the ranks of the Saudi media and later served as an unofficial spokesman and adviser for the royal family.

His career in Saudi Arabia came to a halt when Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman barred him from writing in the kingdom as part of a widespread crackdown on dissent. Mr. Khashoggi went into self-imposed exile in the United States, where he is a resident but not a citizen, becoming a prominent critic of the Saudi monarchy in regular columns for The Washington Post.

The crown prince often the focus of his criticism, with Khashoggi’s recent columns slamming him for “peddling revisionist history,” & jailing prominent women’s rights activists and for stifling free speech.

This at least explains why it was the Turkish Press that was so obsessed with his whereabouts and the first on the scene about his murder; Khashoggi and the President are friends.  Of course that raises more questions than it answers, but at least it gives us something to explore.  We discover in the Turkish papers, that “Khashoggi is an Arabic surname of Turkish origin.”  That seems to happen a lot in Middle East, there was also the Egyptian Queen Farida that had a similar background.

                                   Turks in Egypt

Both families were part of the Ottoman Turk settlement of Egypt trying to displace the natural north African population with Islamic Turks.

In 1835 the British Missionary Herald reported that “The population [of Egypt] is of a mixed character, the great mass being Mohammedans, either of Arab or Turkish descent. ”  By 1840 the secular British Saturday Magazine stated that Egypt’s population was “about two millions and a half, the majority of whom are of Arab or Turkish descent,…”. And in 1878 the German Karl Baedeker Firm described the Turkish community to be a comparatively small section of the population, mainly concentrated to the towns.

So there is some discrepancy there, but we do know that Germany and the Ottomans were great allies, hence the start of the World War I, so we can take Baedeker’s claims with a grain of salt as obviously they were trying to minimize the Turkish influence.  Nonetheless, as Egypt was under Ottoman Rule, we can surmise that the Turk settlers were getting favorable treatment and preferences, hence their rise.

                                                                   The Khashoggi Family

All of that  though are generalisations, until the Indian  The Print reports,

Adnan Khashoggi, the international arms dealer,was the infamous go-between in the Iran Contra arms affair in the mid-1980s.  (He died November 2017).  His  father was a doctor to the founder of the Saudi monarchy, King Abdul Aziz, while his mother was Turkish.  His sister, Samira,  was the mother of billionaire Dodi Fayed, Princess Diana’s lover, who died with her in the Paris car crash in 1997. This made Jamal Khashoggi and Dodi Fayed cousins.

Looking at Wikipedia there is a whole list of Jamal’s family is listed but neither his parents nor children.  We know that Dr. Khashoggi, Jamal’s grandfather,  had six children, two of which are Adnan and the other Samira.  There is another daughter, Soheir Khashoggi, who is still alive and reported to be 71.  She is fine artist who has a degree from Beirut’s Interior Design Center, and a writer.  Wikipedia states that she has four daughters.

Next is Assia Khashoggi a creative psychotherapist based in London (see the picture above next to her brother Adnan,  Assia is wearing blue).  No personal information on her is about at all so that is a dead end because he could have many more children via other wives, mistresses etc.  This is just a listing of his acknowledged children.

A still image from security footage of Jamal Khashoggi and his fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, entering their residence shortly after he returned from London in the early morning of Oct. 2.

So, who are Jamal’s  parents?  We do not know.  Adnan had eight children and a listing of them is unknown.  It would seem that a Adnan or a brother is Jamal’s father because of the surname and his connections, but that is speculative and like the father we again hit the problem of children from other liasions.  We  admit that his ancestry is much like the Lebanese Prime Minister’s connections, are lost in a maze of speculation and missing information; family sites are gone and only found via the WayBackMachine and even then only the index pages (the default first page of a site) and it is doubtful that they will ever release the family ancestral tree.

Wikipedia, not a recommended source of information by any standard, states that Jamal has no children, but on Thursday, October 25, the WSJ was reporting that his son, Salah, also a reporter, was finally being allowed to leave Saudi Arabia.  There was no word on his other son or other children, at this time.

Sahl bin Ahmed Khashoggi and Salah bin Jamal Khashogg (shown above) i met the Saudi Royals today in Riyadh, ..via Business Insider.com

                                            Finally, the Chart

The chart that heads this post is the one Google and Khashoggi’s Turkish fiance use, but Mudbreaker states that is wrong based on his passport and the true date is January 22, 1958 in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.  Why the ten month difference?   While I cannot say specifically, that Khashoggi is a Bundle Temperament Type maybe part of the answer — they do tend to be rather private about their personal details.

The green one above is the January 1958 date while the white one the October date, both in whole house format and set for sunrise.  January 31 btw, is Saudi Arabia’s longest day, so Jamal was born in the midst of summer and it would seem in the South Hemisphere though I thought it was equatorial.  Mecca is 2385 km or 1482 miles away from the great circle hugging the earth.

This new date gives Khashoggi at 28 Capricorn Ascendant  (“a large aviary”) — using almost all other house systems that becomes 25 Aquarius (an Oriental Rug Dealer).  His Sun in Whole House is at 02 Aquarius Sun (an “unexpected thunderstorm”) and his moon is 27 Aquarius (“ancient pottery filled with violets”¹) and was a new moon at the time of his birth. Neither the Sun nor Moon degree change.

A Biwheel of the Progressed Jamal (in pink) and natal (in Green).  Notice that the P.Mars is conjunct the N.Sun and that the P. Venus, his reason for going to the consultate, is conjunct his N. PoF at 21 Aquarius (“intoxicated chickens”).

  Footnotes:

Violets in the Language of the Flowers means, faithfulness and modesty.  It is associated with the month of February supporting the Amethyst was revered in Ancient Greece.  Illinois, Wisconsin, New Jersey and Rhode Island all chose it for their state flower.

Digging thru Jamal Khashoggi 'If you ask Google "when is Jamal Khashoggi's birthday", it will return October 13 1958.  Based on that, we created this chart using a sunrise birthtime and whole houses since we are working the dark. 

[wecappdac]

Baedeker's Egypt and the Sudan Tour Book 8th Edition 1929

http://dlvr.it/Pn1qPn

[tinymixtapes]

Music Review: Alvarius B. - Alvarius B Vs Abdel Baqy Byro In Cairo

Alvarius B. Alvarius B Vs Abdel Baqy Byro In Cairo [Nashazphone; 2017] Rating: 3/5 As I’ve said before, a schizophrenic out on a walk with his Tascam DR-05 is infinitely more interesting than a neurotic moping on his couch with an Epi Texan. You gotta get outta yer head and let the world create itself around you. Yo-yo around town, let Cairo guide you. The city pens something new daily, but yer too up and out to pay any attention. That’s the secret: yer the yo-yo and Cairo is flippin’ you around her fingers. Walk the dog around the world and up the elevator. Only when yer at the apocheir can you really see the whole place laid out as it actually is. Yeah, real heads know that the yo-yo is a state of mind and these two, Bishop and Byro, they’re real heads. They’re peregrine falcons who fell asleep on the bus. --- You’d never believe it, but I’ve scored some high-level scuttlebutt! A genuine communique from out of the shadows of Sugar Street. I was directed to this geezer, baleful and billy-goateed, slurping down shrimp at a Chinese spot. After not a little bit of convincing, he pointed me to another geezer, and this next one to another. Before I knew it, I had criss-crossed Cairo a dozen times, kissing the feet of every streetside dignitary in town. Anyway, I finally got to them in the middle of their rounds. Those wizened, cracktoothed boys, with radar antennae strapped to their domes, were wandering about and sorting through trash. They dragged me into an ahwa and all piled around the shisha. Between sips of tea and sips of smoke, I made my request; they nearly cackled themselves off their cushions. “Abdel Baqy Byro?” they sputtered and sprayed, misting me in sweet minty shai. “No such person around here!” Naguib, summoning all his reserve solemnity and sagacity, pinched his chin and disclosed: “Without a doubt, it’s a fake name, a pseudonym, a shield.” And he was right. It wasn’t even a pen name, just a name for a pen. --- There are social and political questions we can ask at this juncture, ones that go beyond authenticity as a purely aesthetic or performative value. The creation of this heteronym, presumably Cairene, could certainly be considered just another iteration of the tendency to repackage and repurpose the lived experiences of others as some exotic curio, for example. Even in its geographic/cultural specificity, even if we consider these representations to obtain within the contemporary mode of living in Cairo, the facelessness of the project only serves to submit the voices and performers within the piece to the homogenizing regime of Western media consumption. Moreover, his attempts at weaving his own work into the collage speak to a bizarre sense of dominance he has over the narratives being spun. Would I consider this a craven attempt at authenticity? Maybe, but I also think it doesn’t matter all that much. I think he doesn’t even care about authenticity or how other people might define it. My inclination is to call it a complementary persona, a look in the mirror that reveals someone other than himself. A sounding board to reflect upon, a muse to cast admiration upon, a rival to beat upon. Maybe he just needs an alternate personality to skulk his way through the city. A version of himself that can sit on trains and spy on football teams. It can be tough sometimes to get by unseen, and what he is trying to do benefits from a certain type of anonymity. [Undecipherable voices] A record label? No, I don’t know anything about that. I’ll have to look into it. --- God, it smells. This whole city is just a broiler for garbage. Yeah, I know him. I practically taught him everything he knows. I taught him the secret to getting around town and the secret to surveil without limit. It’s easy. All you have to do is be the biggest weirdo in sight. Loosen up the wrists and limber up the legs. Make yourself flexible like melted plastic under the Cairo sun. Bug out your eyes and slink real low. Everyone that sees you has to not want anything to do with you. A real pariah, so not even a mugger would risk contracting your social disease. If you can manage that, you can go anywhere and do anything. But, honestly, he’s a sneak, and I wouldn’t trust him. The last time I caught him, he was in the night market, moaning into a microphone with a shitty speaker at his hip. I don’t think he was even singing in any real language, but the tourists were just coursing coins into his hat. Yeah, I wouldn’t trust him. He’s got the blood of poets on his hands, but, always with his wolfish grin, he just washes them invisible. --- Review: Alvarius B. - Alvarius B Vs Abdel Baqy Byro In Cairo By SamKapp, 2.27.2017 Honestly, I don’t even know where to begin with this mess. On the whole, I think this entire record is unlistenable and without any redeeming qualities. Half of it sounds like it was recorded in the back of a U-Haul truck and the other half isn’t even music! It’s just people talking and street noise and stuff. I don’t know if misters Bishop and Byro think their doing something cool or edgy with this album, but I can tell you that it does not work. From the lame raps with dumb autotuned vocals to the meandering go-nowhere guitar, the “music” on this record is slim and unsatisfying. And also, most of these lyrics are gross and some are downright offensive. I bet your moms would be ashamed of you two. Actually, there definitely trying to be edgy. With the weird political stuff (messing around on your laptop while a news report plays in the background?? C’mon!) and cringey spoken word, it’s tough to take this release seriously in a world where we have artists like The C▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒, A▒ L▒▒▒▒▒▒▒, and R▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ putting out new music. I really don’t think it’s fair to real music to even give this record a score, but since I have to, I’ll give it a 1/30 P.S. Oh, and for the record, to Bishop and Byro, I do write songs, thank you very much. And they’re a whole lot better than the half-baked garbage you put onto your album and try to sell to people for a crazy amount of money. --- I have seen a malaise drown this poor city in recent years. The various political ruptures that have torn through the region, I believe, have left many mute and cloistered within the smallness of their own lives. It feels like listening to the same, degraded, sad song over and over, playing through the words and gestures of every soul crowded on the streets. Even the typically amiable men who crowd the coffee shops on break seem lethargic and without conviviality. A stultifying silence reigns. Now, I must fully admit that I am not completely aware of the provenance of this music, but by descriptors and collected players, I think this is what music in Cairo must sound like today, in these times. These two gentlemen have provided for us an antidote with which to dispel the abulia that looms specter-like over the populace. It is ecstatic and free, moving with grace and humor from one passage to the next. Yes, it is, on occasion, a little coarse, but its brio is to be admired. A finger on the pulse, indeed, it comes to us as a document of life in the daylight and beneath moon. I hear Cairo in the snatches of street and radio, all tempered by the unusual musical style of the duo. It is refreshing to hear the popular, though sometimes, and unfortunately, backwards-facing, sounds of Cairo repurposed toward something new and exciting. Yes, this is the dithyramb of the people, the Cairene chorus. I would call it: Cairo écorché! --- My mother listened to it and said I wasn’t allowed to. --- Last night, several men reported to me that they saw him stealing out across the sands, a gravedigger’s toolkit strapped to his back. Now, we wake up to reports of an ancestral tomb prised open and thoroughly pilfered. So far, our investigation has yielded little of use. It is clear he was using an assumed name during his stay in Cairo, one tied to a variety of suspect occurrences. We very much regret our lack of vigilance in this matter. However, there is one lead that we hope can bring this thief to justice. Left behind in the hotel room, it appears he forgot to take with him his copy of Baedeker’s Egypt (5th ed.) filled with notes on his criminal intentions. We would urge all receiving this message to keep alert for this individual. In order to restore both property and dignity, it is imperative that he be found and turned over to the appropriate authorities. Before this becomes a distant episode, before he burns across the Maghreb and disappears into the lines of the Atlas, justice must be done. http://j.mp/2oEZybi

[l-egypte]

December 1, 2020 | Baedeker’s Egypt 

In May 2020, I read The Lady Travelers Guide to Scoundrels & Other Gentlemen, which featured a woman and a man who travel from London, England, to Paris, France, in 1889. And in the book was a mention of a Baedeker. As I had not heard of this term before, I decided to look into it.

According to the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, 2e, a Baedeker refers to “any of various travel guidebooks published by the firm founded by the German Karl Baedeker.”

Wikipedia has a list of Baedeker guides: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Baedeker_Guides. Some of the guides covered such places as Austria (e.g., Austria-Hungary, 11e); Belgium and Holland (with the 11th and subsequent editions including the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg); the Dominion of Canada, with Newfoundland and an excursion to Alaska (with four editions—to note, Newfoundland joined the confederation, i.e., the rest of Canada, in 1949); Egypt (with the 6th and subsequent editions including Sudan); and more.

Of course, of interest to me was the Egyptian guides, and I found a couple of them on archive.org, though I imagine you can find all the other editions there as well (I believe Wikipedia has the links).

Egypt, 4th Edition (1898)

Egypt and the Sudan, 7th Edition (1914)

It would be interesting to read these old travel guides so that one may compare the tourism and travelling experiences of then to now. And especially with Egypt, one can compare which monuments, temples, etc. were discovered and available to tourists as attractions and, with some figuring out, which were not. I mean, new archaeological discoveries are not uncommon for Egypt; who knows what tourists in ten years’ time will be gawking at. For example, earlier in 2020, ancient coffins were discovered (see, for example, here). Anyways, these Baedeker guides will not only be a travel to Egypt but a travel through time!

Personally, before travelling to Egypt, I read Lonely Planet’s Egypt [2018]. I like Lonely Planet’s books. Do you have a preferred travel guide?

[Screenshots of scanned pages from the 4th edition of Egypt (1898)]