Topkapi Palace Book

Richard Francis Burton was a multi-talented man - linguist, swordsman, explorer, proto-anthropologist - yet one talent he sorely lacked was editing. His journey disguised as an Afghan dervish setting out from Egypt to do the Hajj to Al Madinah and Meccah was a high risk, fascinating adventure filled with punishing terrain, colorful characters, dangerous bandits, and the constant possibility of being unmasked as an infidel and killed. So this book could have been an absolutely thrilling tale. Parts of it are. When he is describing his interactions with those he meets in Egypt, or his travels with his fellow pilgrims the book is first rate. Yet those passages make up all too little of this book.

Burton had a burning curiosity for knowledge about cultures other than his own. He amassed impressive amounts of information on dress, customs, superstition, history, legends, food, terrain, disease, etc.; there was simply nothing about the cultures that Burton observed that did not catch his interest. The problem with his book is that he included it all. After commenting on some dates he ate, he takes multiple pages to describe all the various kinds of dates that can be found in the region, the different names by which they are called, their medicinal uses, and various ways that the natives prepare them. Ditto multiple pages on diseases, and many other items where a peek rather than an exhaustive examination would have made for more interesting reading.

While I can appreciate the breadth of knowledge that Burton displayed, and the fact that his interest and dogged logging of cultural information made him a forerunner of the modern discipline of anthropology, I regret that his writing falls far short of being as interesting as his actual life. Still, there are passages here that reward slogging through the endless detail, so I will be continuing on to read his second volume.