ABSTRACT
TH E reading of W. K. Loftus’s book, Travels and Researches in Chaldaea and Susiana, which he published in 1857, is extremely interesting at the present day, seventy years later, to those who have travelled and worked there themselves. The description not only of the country, but also of the people, fits the conditions of the present day, barring substitution of rifles for spears and the consequences of the War, perfectly well. Little is altered, and many of the incidents that happened to Loftus might well happen to anybody to-day. His published drawings of objects discovered are quite good, and those of places are gen erally recognizable, though one may smile at the dramatic style of them, notably the picture o f the U r ziggurrat (‘The Great Temple at Miigeyer, from the west’), opposite his page 129 (our Fig. 65), where the gesticulating and spear-carrying Arabs are incidentally much too big for the ziggurrat, or the latter is too small for them, an error that, I believe, occurs often in archi tectural drawings of a far more recent period. But the illustrations of that day had to be dramatic, and considering that the picture had usually to be re-drawn from the traveller’s sketch (helped at times by the camera lucida), and not always under his supervision, and then engraved by some body else, it is remarkable how accurate these mid-nineteenth-century pictures sometimes are. (The same cannot, of course, be said for the
pictures of the preceding century.) A touch of modernity is given by an apparently highly scientific transliteration of Arabic names with hyphens and accents and double yy ( j with tashdld) and even an apostrophe (though turned the wrong way) for the ‘din: one purrs with satisfaction at these very modern-looking ‘Durajis’, when one had expected ‘Doorawjees’ in the orthodox Early Victorian ‘Quihi’ style, till suddenly one is brought up short on the same page by such names as ‘Tel Ede’ and ‘Shat-el-Hie’. This is a sudden reversion to ‘Quihi’ spelling, for these places are Tell or Tal ‘ Id1 (presumably) and, of course, the Shatt al-Hai (or better, al-Hayy). The French are still given to such queer mixtures of scientific and Gallican spelling, and mingle in much the same way with symbols under stood of all their peculiar ch and ou, as the Dutch do their oe.
