ABSTRACT
During the summer of Ad 19, the Roman general Germanicus Julius Caesar set out for Egypt to tour its antiquities (Tacitus, annals Book 2: 59). 1 While Germanicus's motives for his Egyptian visit may have been more politically driven than simply visiting what, even by then, were the country's ancient sites, he could do so because there was already a well-established tourist trail (Milne, 1916). 2 Even before the Romans, the Greeks had visited Egypt in order to absorb its culture and history. As early as the mid-fifth century BC, the Greek writer Herodotus ventured up the Nile as far as Elephantine (Herodotus, The Histories, Book 2: 5–99). 3 Germanicus was not the first and would certainly not be the last tourist to visit the antiquities of another culture. Heritage tourism has a long history.
