The Intelligent Dog

You can see a sculpture of Edward William Lane (1801-76) in the National Portrait Gallery. He sits cross-legged and in native Egyptian costume, not far from Leighton's portrait of Sir Richard Burton, the one in profile with the slashed cheek. It was through reading Burton's account of his 1853 expedition in disguise to the forbidden cities of Medina and Mecca that I first heard of Lane's remarkable book, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). Burton obviously thought highly of it as an accurate picture of the Arab way of life. He of course survived that trip only because he knew enough about the Arabs to be taken for one of them, so praise from him in this matter can be taken as authoritative.

Edward William Lane lived in Egypt for several years, mainly in Cairo. He dressed as an Egyptian, he mastered the language, he made himself familiar with all the details of local etiquette, and by good fortune he had a face which could have been that of a pure Arab, so that very soon he was accepted by the natives as one of them. His curiosity was matched only by his industry as a recorder. In his book he sets out to give, as nearly as possible, a complete inventory of the life he found in Egypt in the 1820s. The detail is amazing. So is the range. When you read the book you wonder if there is any ...