I saw several people perform, in a slightly self-conscious manner, the same action I had done: they touched the lawn to convince themselves that this really was grass, not a bright green synthetic substitute rolled out by the college staff. But there was no need to worry, we were at a reception in Pembroke College at the invitation of the Master, and several hundred years of weeding, watering and mowing do make a difference ...
This was just one of several similarly enjoyable occasions during the Astene conference in Cambridge on 15-18 July, 1999. Astene should, by rights and appearances, be the Greek goddess of travel, but it is in fact an acronym of the Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near East. Some 140 participants from twenty countries gathered at Newnham College and, undeterred by the building works all around them, read, listened to and discussed papers which ranged from weighty and worthy to capricious and positively eccentric. The conference was a triumph of enthusiasm and amateurism over the dry and dull academic approach and an occasion for which, I believe, Britain is better suited than any other country in the world. How often scholarly conferences leave one drained and exhausted and keen to go home, and what a contrast this was. The best-organized events appear to be completely spontaneous, and this the conference organizers achieved with a deftness which was truly admirable.
Not that there was any lack of scholarship in the papers read at the conference. The definition of the aims of the Association, which seemed so straightforward when it was begun, is becoming somewhat more complex. It was no longer just the 19th century travellers with whom the participants were concerned, but now the focus of attention included also voyages to the Holy Land in the 9th-12th centuries and slightly later rihla travel logs of Moslem travellers. The accounts and experiences of European travellers were still prominently represented (is it only my impression that most of them had a truly awful time?), but the range of topics gets ever wider and all-embracing. The discussion may now easily turn to Shakespeare's plays, Gerard de Nerval's oriental novellae, Benjamin Disraeli's novels, the views of Egypt by Gérôme or paintings of Istanbul, and nobody finds this odd. Some of the figures in the early travel who were presented to us in special papers, such as Avraam Norov, Archbishop Gabashvili or Jacob Jonas Björnståhl, were, at least for me, completely new.
There were little gems of detailed investigation among the topics, such as the paper on Gardner Wilkinson's house at Sheikh Abd el-Qurna, or on the impact of Islam on high Victorian architecture transmitted through travel in the Near East. Having listened to a splendidly factual paper on the two businessmen, John Sanderson and George Baldwin, I appreciate just a little more that it was not just the yearning for the spiritual which helped Napoleon to make up his mind about invading Egypt. Sometimes the definition of a traveller was stretched to its limits: the Egyptologist Samuel Birch was so busy studying ancient Egyptian monuments that he never found time to go to Egypt, and Egyptian mummies travelled in the direction opposite to that taken by most people talked about at the conference. But let us not be too pedantic. All these were pieces of a larger mosaic picture which was being created at the conference. And there were some unexpected moments, too. I shouldn't have put my money on the workshop on graffiti but few discussions proved to be more enthusiastic (and also, I have to say, few fluctuated so wildly).
This was a most informative and enjoyable event. The next such occasion, in Edinburgh in 2001, will be hard put to outstage it.
Jaromir Malek
©Jaromir Malek
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