George Finlay in Egypt and Switzerland: Nineteenth-Century Travel, Scholarship and Social Networks

Abstract

George Finlay was a British gentlemen and philhellene, resident in Greece in the mid-nineteenth century. His journals, letters, library and antiquities now reside at the British School at Athens, collections that provide a wealth of information both about Finlay himself and about the world of his contemporaries. This paper looks at two episodes from Finlay’s life as preserved in his archive, documenting two overseas travels: the first is a tour around Egypt, Jerusalem and the Near East in 1845 and 1846, and the second is a series of repeat visits to Switzerland beginning in 1859 and continuing in the late 1860s. By looking at Finlay’s itineraries and at the activities he undertook in Egypt and Switzerland, and by analysing what and how Finlay chose to document in his notebooks, the aim of this paper is to understand more about Finlay’s motivations for travel and his intellectual formation. While Finlay’s time in the Near East was likely spurred by the recent publication of handbooks and by a developing fashion for (biblical) tourism, his time in Switzerland coincided with the flurry of excitement from recent excavations of the Swiss lake villages, allowing Finlay to re-engage an interest in prehistory that he had long since developed. In each case, Finlay’s social connections and his networks played a large part in directing his programme.