Archaeologists, Tourists, Interpreters

Rachel Mairs, Maya Muratov, Nicholas Reeves

"In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, growing numbers of tourists and scholars from Europe and America, fascinated by new discoveries, visited the Near East and Egypt - attracted by the riches and mysteries of the Lands of the Bible, the Pharaohs and the Arabian Nights. Almost all such visitors, no matter how esoteric or academic their pursuits, had to deal with the local authorities and the native people who would comprise the workforce for the archaeological excavations. Although a number of archaeologists we discuss eventually learned to speak the local languages (mostly Arabic), the majority of them had to rely on interpreters, dragomans, translators, and local guides. This study, based on the published travel memoirs, guidebooks, personal papers, and archaeological reports of the British and American archaeologists, deals with the socio-political status and...