A Curious and Convivial Traveller: Edward Roger Pratt in Greece and Egypt 1832-34

In 2001 the British Museum acquired the first of two ancient Egyptian
stelae from the collection of the traveller Edward Roger Pratt
(1789-1863) of Ryston Hall, Norfolk, and discovered his 1832-34
unpublished journals for Greece and Egypt and the 136-page album with
his own drawings, watercolours, and paper impressions of bas-reliefs
from a solo Nile voyage to the Second Cataract. Pratt recorded ancient
monuments and sites, many later damaged or destroyed. In Greece Pratt
travelled widely and adventurously with scholarly architects and artists
studying ancient Greek sites, while in Egypt his guides were the works
of the French Egyptologists Jean-François Champollion and Dominique
Vivant Denon. A gregarious and enthusiastic traveller, Pratt was
supported by extensive consular networks, expatriate communities and
other travellers. In this volume his life and travels are reconstructed
from his many journals, the travel journals for Greece and Egypt are
transcribed and annotated, his maps and plans reproduced, his dispersed
antiquities collection reconstructed, and the album drawings are
identified and published in colour.