Photographs of Petra and the Holy Land at the turn of the century

[Photo album - Petra and the Holy Land - Borel, Maurice, Swiss cartographer (1860-1926)]. Souvenir d'Orient.

€ 7,500.00

A cartographer's photograph album from Petra and the Holy Land, featuring over forty photographs of the Suez, Mara, the Sinai Desert, Nahel, Jerusalem, and Nazareth. Archaeological sites are given some special interest, with 12 photographs alone dedicated to Petra, and others showing ruins ("Ruines du monastère de Firan", "Vieille demeure d'anachorètes") as well as a rock with "inscriptions nabateennes" quite visible in the shot. Others show a camel caravan through the desert, and local travellers in traditional Arab dress.

The album was drawn up by the cartographer and amateur archaeologist Maurice Borel of Neuchâtel, who travelled to Palestine and Egypt between 1901 and 1910, though his name does not appear in the text. The photographs are each captioned in his perfectly trained hand almost indistinguishable from typesetting, and the first leaf features an equally precise hand-drawn map in India ink, with the route the owner took sketched out in red.

While photograph albums were common souvenirs for Europeans travelling to the Holy Land, this example stands out for consisting entirely of original photographs (rather than commercial prints purchased from the popular souvenir photographers who did such prolific business in Jerusalem), and apparently an original route, encompassing a traveller's archeological interests as much as Biblical.

Hint of fading to first four photographs, with small ink mark to first photo; minor foxing to first and last mounts; otherwise quite well preserved.