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In an Antique Land Paperback – 5 Jan 2012

by Amitav Ghosh (Author)

21 customer reviews

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In an Antique Land is a subversive history in the guise of a traveller's tale. When the author stumbles across a slave narrative in the margins of an ancient text, his curiosity is piqued. What follows is a ten year search, which brings author and slave together across 800 hundred years of colonial history. Bursting with anecdote and exuberant detail, it offers a magical, intimate biography of the private life of a country, Egypt, from the Crusades to Operation Desert Storm.

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Product details

Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: Granta Books; 2nd edition edition (5 Jan. 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1847081940
ISBN-13: 978-1847081940
Product Dimensions: 12.8 x 3 x 19.8 cm
Average Customer Review: 21 customer reviews
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 266,684 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #59 in Books > Travel & Holiday > Countries & Regions > Africa > Egypt
- #2433 in Books > Travel & Holiday > Travel Writing

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Product description

About the Author

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956 and is one of India's best-known writers. His books include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, Incendiary Circumstances, The Hungry Tide. His most recent novel, Sea of Poppies, is the first volume of the Ibis Trilogy.

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reader 451

Beautifully written

16 August 2012

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

What do Egypt and India have in common? They are both predominantly rural, poor countries where ordinary people hanker after the trappings of modernity yet live immersed in the myths and practices of age-old traditions. But they also share a rich history of trade and migration, especially belonging to the Middle Ages. Such are the two strands from which Amitav Ghosh has woven In an Antique Land.

Gosh, otherwise a novelist, spent a number of years in rural Egypt in the 1980s on a historical research trip. Since his training was in anthropology, he also made meticulous notes of his everyday environment. The result is a volume that is both travel and history writing, and both sociological and private testimony. Gosh gives us Egyptian village life in moving detail: its family clans, its festivals, its preoccupations with money, jobs, marriage. The writer was there, took the time to learn the dialect, befriended his hosts and took a genuine interest in their lives. And if he was a Hindu, this only made him an attraction among a friendly and curious public. His book shines with simple but quirky anecdotes, and with dialogues more telling than any long rendition. Meanwhile, in filigree, Gosh also unfolds the story of Abraham Ben Yiju, an eleventh-century Jewish merchant, and that of his slave and business associate from Mangalore. Ben Yiju's tale provides a certain symmetry to the author's, since, originally from North Africa, the medieval merchant lived for a long time on the Malabar coast. But it is also genuine, and Gosh takes his reader through the fascinating story of the Cairo Geniza, one of the largest troves of medieval manuscripts ever unearthed, once attached to a synagogue.

In an Antique Land is anything but opinionated. Its writing is full of reserve and gentle understanding, and nor does it condemn. Yet at the same time it is subtly subversive of certain historical commonplaces: about the contributions of Western discovery, trade, and modernity or about Jewish-Muslim antinomy, for example. The trade routes that freely joined the Mediterranean to India and beyond were destroyed by monopoly-seeking Europeans. Gosh shows us a lost world that peacefully spanned two civilizations across the Indian Ocean and, through his portrait of contemporary Egypt, he shows how it still resonates, or how its loss is still to be felt on either side. Perhaps this is not news for readers already versed into pre-modern world history. Yet even for the knowledgeable, this gem of a book is sure to be filled with discoveries.

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I. Black

Profound, Fascinating and Wise

24 October 2012

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

In the early 1980s Amitav Ghosh was living in rural Egypt, engaged in field world for his social anthropology doctorate. In this book Ghosh plaits together three different stories: that of his time living in two Egyptian villages, his return to the villages eight years later and the life of 12th century North African Jewish merchant Ben Yiju and his Indian `slave' (actually more of a business associate) Bomma. Ghosh discovered the Ben Yiju story by examining documents from the massive haul found in the Geniza (synagogue document repository) of the Palestinian synagogue in the Egyptian town of Fustat. The documents were acquired by Cambridge University, where Ghosh tracked them down.

Ghosh parallels his own sojourns in Egypt, the Malabar coast and return to Egypt, with those of Ben Yiju, who spent some twenty years in Mangalore, marrying a freed Indian slave, before returning to North Africa. Gradually pictures are built up of Egypt and India, ancient and modern. The fascinating revelations about Jewish life in medieval Egypt and the Maghreb , the close relationship between the Muslims and Jews, destroyed only in the last century, are intertwined with Ghosh's own story, a perception of Egyptian villagers through Indian eyes, and, even more interesting, their perception of the Indian catapulted into their midst. Some aspects of his culture were so alien to them that they sometimes seemed to view him as an ignorant refugee from a primitive country, rather than understanding the ignorance of their own unworldliness.

The documents Ghosh worked with provided the framework of Ben Yiju's existence. The meat was provided by Ghosh through painstaking research and logical supposition both in Egypt and in India. Most thought-provoking was his visit at the end of the book to the tomb of a Muslim saint, who, it transpired, was also a Jewish Rabbi. Certainly in the 1980s when Ghosh's visit took place, the tomb was attracting pilgrims from both the Muslim world and Israel, the latter contributing to a huge tourist industry built around the saint's annual festival. This, and the theme throughout the book of Jews and Muslims co-existing like brothers graphically demonstrated the tragedy of what has happened to this brotherhood in the last half century.

When I need inspiration, both as a reader and as a writer, I will dip into this book again and again.

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George

Interesting and unexpected

12 March 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Set in rural Egypt and gives a glimpse of village life with well drawn characters.

There is a sub plot concerning ancient papers of a wealthy trader.ters

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john

If you are expecting a good novel in Ghosh s normal and excellent output

4 November 2016

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

If you are expecting a good novel in Ghosh s normal and excellent output. This is not it. Very muddled and instantly forgettable. A sort of autobiography and research into ancient document which is never resolved.

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Grant

Five Stars

17 December 2016

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Good service and read

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J.P.J. Greene

Four Stars

30 November 2016

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Good

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amanda

good

11 May 2016

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Interesting book, good read

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Annie

Three Stars

1 August 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

not as gripping as other books he has written

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Most recent customer reviews

Very boring. Harped on a lot about the Egyptians' fascination with Hindus' worship of cows.

Published on 28 September 2015

Dr D A Mogendorff

A very interesting read which informs as well as entertains ...

A very interesting read which informs as well as entertains. However, on the main subject of the book the story is quite thin.

Published on 24 August 2015

L S

Five Stars

Great as expected

Published on 1 July 2015

Mrs Helen Hacking

Five Stars

Any book by Amitav Ghosh is a good read

Published on 17 April 2015

p.claisse

Excellent

An excellent book with some interesting history woven into the narrative. The author is clearly an expert on the area.

Published on 6 September 2013

yogame

Slow

Couldn't get into this at all . I hate not finishing a book , but this one beat me , I am afraid

Published on 24 July 2013

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