the nile the Nile Valley in classical times. Mostly, they came to marvel at the ancient ruins – Pliny the Elder was one of the first authors to describe the Sphinx at Giza, while Homer had written of the fabled ‘Hundred-gated Thebes’ – or to hear the ‘singing of Memnon’ (the eerie sound emitted from one of the Colossi of Memnon) at dawn, an experience that became especially fashionable in the reign of Hadrian. Many visitors were soldiers in the Roman army who took advantage of a tour of duty in Egypt to see some of the sights. With the coming of Christianity to the Roman Empire, the ‘pagan’ temples and tombs of the ancient Egyptians rather lost their appeal, and it was Egypt’s deserts that drew new visitors, in the form of hermits seeking a life of prayerful asceticism and solitude. The Islamic conquest of the Nile Valley in the mid seventh century ad changed all that. While Christian monasteries in the wilderness continued to flourish, Arab scholars showed renewed interest in Egypt’s ancient past, and a particular fascination for the River Nile upon which the country’s prosperity depended – and which was so different from anything to be found in the Arab homelands. The wonders of the Nile inspired writers based in Egypt, many of them teachers at Cairo’s al-Azhar mosque, as well as visitors from further afield, such as the Persian traveller Naser-e Khosraw who visited Cairo in the eleventh century and the German monk Rudolph von Suchem who saw the pyramids in 1336. In 1589, an anonymous Venetian reached as far upstream as Luxor, becoming one of the first Europeans since Roman times to comment on the ruins of ancient Thebes. It was not until the eighteenth century, however, that Egypt really started to impinge on European consciousness. In the wake of the Englightenment, many of the early visitors were devout Christians in search of concrete proof of the Old Testament stories. Hence the first Englishman to travel up the Nile much beyond Cairo was an Anglican clergyman, Richard Pococke, who came to Egypt in the winter of 1737–8. After visiting the pyramid of 16
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