Rafalovich, A.A.: A Journey Through Lower Egypt and the Inner Regions of the Delta

Title

Puteshestvie po Nizhnemu Egiptu i vnutrennim oblastiam Del’ty, Sankt-Peterburg 1850

A Journey Through Lower Egypt and the Inner Regions of the Delta

Keywords

Summary

The volume includes a map of Egypt and a preface, in which the author illustrates the circumstances of his travel: he left Saint Petersburg on a government mission in February 1846, and, after visiting Turkey, Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, he returned to Russia in November 1848. The purpose of this journey was to document the present situation of Egyptian villages and their inhabitants “with impartiality, independence, and, if possible, from an objective standpoint”. His main goal was to determine whether there remained plague-affected areas and sanitary risks, especially in the rural areas of the country. Rafalovich notices the difference between his own way of travelling and that of Europeans, who tend to reside in comfortable European hotels and to visit only the main archaeological sites without paying any attention to present-day Egypt. On the contrary, Rafalovich not only monitors the epidemic situation, but he also pays attention to the topography, the climate, the economy, and the ethnography of the country.

The volume is divided into two main parts, called “books”. The first book (9 chapters) is devoted to a trip along the Nile, from Cairo to Rosetta and Damietta. The second book (5 chapters) is an account of a trip from Cairo to Alexandria, through the inner lands of the Nile’s delta.

Bio

Artemii Rafalovich was a physician, born in the family of Jewish merchants who settled in Odessa when he was young. He graduated in medicine from the University of Berlin, and later obtained a doctorate from the Imperial university of Dorpat (Tartu). He worked as a professor of forensic medicine in Odessa. In 1846 he was sent on a research mission to the East to study the causes and the cures for the plague: he visited Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Algeria, and Tunisia. Upon his return to Saint Petersburg, he was appointed a member of the Medical Council. His academic contributions appeared in various publications, including “Zhurnal ministerstva obrazovaniia”, “Zapiski Obshchestva sel’skogo khoziaistva Iuzhnoi Rossii”, and “Zapiski Imperatorskogo Russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva” (featuring Ethnographic Notes on the Nubians, with a dictionary of their language), as well as “Otechestvennye Zapiski” (with the article Ethnographic Notes on Constantinople). His monograph A Journey Through Lower Egypt and the Inner Regions of the Delta was published in Saint Petersburg in 1850. Rafalovich’s book enjoyed widespread circulation in Russia, and the orientalist I. Krachkovskii (1883-1951) praised it as “the most valuable source for understanding numerous facets of Egypt’s socio-economic life, representing an exceptional phenomenon in all our literature of this time”.

Sources

Russkii biograficheskii slovar’, ed. by A. Polovtsova, t. 4, Sankt-Peterburg 1910, p. 505-506;

M. Zabrodskaia, Russkie puteshestvenniki po Afrike, Moskva 1955;

Afrika: entsiklopedicheskii spravochnik, ed. by V. Potekhin, t. 2, Moskva 1963, p. 153.

M.E.