By Mursi Saad El-Din I met Anthony Sattin many years back when he was in Cairo gathering material for a book he was writing about British society in Egypt from 1768 to 1956. By now he is an authority on this subject on which he has published many books and articles. Two of his early works occupy a special place in my memory, Florence Nightingale's Letters from Egypt: a Journey on the Nile 1849-50, and Lifting the Veil, a book which traces the development of Western society along the Nile, showing how Egypt brought out a peculiar eccentricity in the imperial British character. In his preface to Lifting the Veil, Sattin quotes from The Rubaiyat of Omar El-Khayam : "They talk to you and me behind the veil/ But if the veil be lifted, where are we?" The veil in the title of the book is both a reference to the veil which "separated Egyptians from foreigners", in Sattin's words; and Lord Cromer's unofficial control of Egypt called the "Veiled Protectorate". As for the Egypt itself, Sattin quotes Lucie Duff Gordon as saying "this country is a palimpsest, in which the Bible is written over Herodotus, and the Koran over that. In the towns the koran is most visible, in the country Herodotus." Further developing Duff Gordon's idea of Egypt being a palimpsest, Sattin describes the aim of his book as follows: "Here were three facets of Egypt -- Herodotus and the ancient civilizations, the Biblical world and the living Islamic culture. Through their own private involvement with the country and, later, through their official contact under the Veiled Protectorate, Lucie and the many other foreigners who came out to Egypt before and after her created yet another facet. What I have set out to do in this book... is to unveil this most recent, western inscription on the Egyptian palimpsest." Lifting the Veil deals with a wide array of British travellers from James Bruce who traveled to Egypt in the 1770s to 19th century travellers such as Lucie Duff Gordon, Florence Nightingale, Samuel Shepheard of the Shepheard Hotel, Thomas Cook, Thackery, David Roberts, Amelia Edwards, Lord Edward Cecil, Kitchner and Gordon of Khartoum, among others. Anthony Sattin also devotes very interesting sections of his book to other European adventurers who ventured into Egypt during the late 18th century and early 19th century. Most famous of all is Bonaparte. Sattin provides a detailed description of what Napoleon's savants did to launch the new science of Egyptology. Of Bonaparte in Egypt, Sattin says "There was an element of crusade as well as conquest about the French arrival in Egypt in 1798... The savants were scholars who were brought to fulfill the noble part of the expedition, to rediscover and save the wisdom and civilization of ancient Egypt." Another famous traveller dealt with in Lifting the Veil is the Swiss national Jean Louis Burckhardt. Burckhardt arrived in Egypt in 1812, and disguised himself as a Muslim cleric -- Sheikh Ibrahim Ibn Abdulla -- in order to be able to freely explore the country. "While the English tourists had stopped at Ibrim [Nubia], Burckhardt went further up the Nile and reached Abu Simbel on 22 March 1813." Then comes the Italian Giovanni Belzoni who came to Egypt to demonstrate a hydraulic water pump, but failing in his venture, he turned to antiquities. Belzoni met Burkhardt and they both delved into antiquities. Among the treasures they unearthed were the colossal busts of Memnon and Rameses II which lay in the ground of the Ramesseum at Thebes. One of the busts, which Belzoni said was smiling at the idea of being moved to England, now rests in the British Museum.
