In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale Paperback – March 29, 1994

This book was first published in 1994 . The author had spend time in Egypt in the early eighties doing fieldwork for a D.Phil thesis while a graduate student in Oxford.Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956 and raised and educated in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iran, Egypt, India, and the United Kingdom, He presented his thesis in Oxford in 1991 entitled ``Kinship in Relation to the Economic and Social Organization of an Egyptian Village Community''. In An Antique Land is effectively a rewriting of the ethno- graphic material of the thesis, but with a completely revolutionized focus.Amitav Ghosh was able in this book to present to the reader a completely different text than the traditional ethnographic texts. He is a real master of story telling and character creation. The Egyptian village that he studied comes to life and his informants become real life persons with their feelings, beliefs, passions and hopes. As an Indian he is able to communicate with a society that has so much in common with his own and does not have the misunderstandings that sometimes slants the writings of Western anthropologists. As an Egyptian I found in this book the empathy that I find in my own heart towards my people and the stereotypes that sometimes colours our views of other cultures. But despite the differences Ghosh was able to present the portrait of Egyptian country side and the upheavals that it underwent over the next two decades after the Irak Iran war when Egyptians started to leave the villages to seek a better future abroad.I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the dialogue between cultures and of the relationship between the West and Middle and Far East.

This book takes its title from the first line of Shelley's poem "Ozymandias": "I met a traveller from an antique land". None of the other reviewers, for whatever reason, have mentioned this extremely piquant fact. The reason for its piquancy is that Ghosh here explores the same theme as Shelley does in his poem: The passing of all things earthly.Though it is more evident in Shelley's poem, the dual narratives in the book, one set in Aden, Malabar and other entrepots of a millennium past, one amongst the "fellahs" of Egypt in the decade leading up to the Persian Gulf War in 1990, point the reader to contemplate the ever-shifting sands of history and temporality, the ever-changing relationships of religion to religion, country to country, person to person.The passage on Malabar, once a great trading centre, is exquisite:"There is nothing now anywhere in sight of the Bandar to lend credence to the great mansions and residences that Ibn Battuta and Duarte Barbosa spoke of. Now the roads and lanes around the wharfs fall quiet after sunset; shipping offices shut their doors, coffee-shops pull down their shutters, and only a few passengers waiting to cross to the sand-spit remain. The imagination balks at the thought that the Bandar once drew merchants and mariners from distant corners of the world."And, likewise, at the end of the book, during the onset of the Gulf War, when a great exodus of Egyptians - including Ghosh's friend Nabeel - are trying to make it back into Egypt, the scene portrayed on the TV set, conveyed in the last sentence in the book, is equally Shelleyan:"There was nothing to be seen except crowds: Nabeel had vanished into the anonymity of History."Though, at points, annoyingly disjointed, this volume manages - when considered as a whole - to convey the fleeting nature of human endeavour and so to remain true to its title's source.

This author can do no wrong. A brilliant insightful writer that can tell a tale. Warm, witty, charming and possibly the best book I have ever read about the field studies of an anthropologist. This is among my favorite of Ghosh's works and this says a lot as he is my favorite writer on this planet.

This book didn't seem to have the story line I was used to. I didn't care for it as much as some of his other books.

Widely-travelled and widely-read friends with a great deal of time spent in India first recommended Amitav Ghosh's writing to me, and one of these women is a writer of considerable excellence herself. Beginning with "Sea of Poppies" I was astounded at the breadth and depth of his research and at his extraordinary ability to maintain historical accuracy while weaving numerous individual's stories into a larger work of historical fiction. Each of the important characters is well-defined and realized.

Fantastic insight at an everyday, village human level into life in both contemporary and Medieval Egypt and the Malabar Coast. Beautifully written, scholarly but with finely drawn characters and vivid background. The birth of the current Middle-Eat disaster can be seen clearly described in this wonderful work.

Although I was immediately fascinated by the historical and literary detective story of the 12th century Jewish merchant and his Indian servant, I did not fully understand Ghosh's mission in writing this book until nearly at the end. Then it became clear to me. This book is an elegy for a way of life that is forever lost. In the 12th century, Jews, Muslims, and Hindus worked in tandem as traders and merchants, with the only reprisals being angry remonstrances rather than armed violence. What we call sophisticated Western civilization has changed all of that.Just as Portuguese and Dutch invasions of the Indian Ocean ended the medieval way of cooperation, the quiet life of the Egyptian villages in which Ghosh lived also ended -- within our lifetimes. As televisions and refrigerators came to those villages, so did anger, strife, and urbanization. There was money to be made during the Iran-Iraq war if you were a young Egyptian man, but you would never return to your village.This book was slow-moving in places but ultimately unforgettable.