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

by Amitav Ghosh (Author)
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 430 ratings
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Once upon a time, an Indian writer named Amitav Ghosh set out as an Indian slave, name unknown, who some seven hundred years before had traveled to the Middle East. The journey took him to a small village in Egypt, where medieval customs coexist with twentieth-century desires and discontents. But even as Ghosh sought to re-create the life of his Indian predecessor, he found himself immersed in those of his modern Egyptian neighbors.
 
Combining shrewd observations with painstaking historical research, Ghosh serves up skeptics and holy men, merchants and sorcerers. Some of these figures are real, some only imagine, but all emerge as vividly as the characters in a great novel. In an Antique Land is an inspired work that transcends genres as deftly as it does eras, weaving an entrancing and intoxicating spell.
Previous page
  1. Print length
    400 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Vintage
  4. Publication date
    March 29, 1994
  5. Dimensions
    5.2 x 0.9 x 7.95 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0679727833
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0679727835
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and spent his childhood in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and northern India. He studied in Delhi and Egypt and at Oxford and taught at various Indian and American universities. The author of five non-fiction books and eight acclaimed novels, Ghosh has also written for Granta, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Observer. He lives in New York City with his wife and two children. His titles Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire received critical acclaim.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Reprint edition (March 29, 1994)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0679727833
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0679727835
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.4 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 0.9 x 7.95 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 430 ratings

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  1. Amitav Ghosh

    Amitav Ghosh

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    Amitav Ghosh (born 11 July 1956), is a Bengali Indian author best known for his work in English fiction.

    Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by David Shankbone (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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  2. Ghosh Amitav

    Ghosh Amitav

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Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
430 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Draz Mohammad Waguih
5.0 out of 5 stars Egypt in the eyes of an Indian
Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2012
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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.
12 people found this helpful
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Daniel Myers
4.0 out of 5 stars The Lone And Level Sands Stretch Far Away
Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2010
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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.
25 people found this helpful
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S. Epstein
5.0 out of 5 stars Amitav Ghosh!
Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2019
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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.
5 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer Thelma Louise Colvin
3.0 out of 5 stars An Antique Land
Reviewed in the United States on July 21, 2011
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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.
One person found this helpful
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5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic historical and contemporary social description of Egypt and the Malabar Coast
Reviewed in the United States on December 16, 2016
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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.
2 people found this helpful
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Janice S Green
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellence in Amitav Ghosh's Work is the Rule
Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2013
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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.
4 people found this helpful
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Jonathan Groner
4.0 out of 5 stars It all comes together and makes an unforgettable point
Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2006
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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.
15 people found this helpful
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Kelsee Jahns
1.0 out of 5 stars I personally really disliked this book
Reviewed in the United States on April 24, 2018
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I personally really disliked this book. I needed it for a studies in literary topics class and the story line is not one I found to be engaging. This is creative non fiction and I had hoped it would be interesting but it was far from it
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Top reviews from other countries

Meera R.
5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful
Reviewed in India on December 13, 2023
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Loved every second of reading it. The book itself is also of good quality.
One person found this helpful
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leslie miller
5.0 out of 5 stars fascinating true account, beautifully written.
Reviewed in Canada on May 10, 2017
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a fascinating account of life in a small egyptian village, by a masterful writer. i will certainly look for more by amitav ghosh.
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Giorgio Banti
5.0 out of 5 stars A very fine novel
Reviewed in Italy on February 10, 2017
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A beautyful novel. Very interesting to read, spacing along between Egypt and India both in contemporary and in Mdieval times, along the Indian Ocean trade routes.
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Anne Connolly
4.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful insight into the origins of world destruction being played out now
Reviewed in Australia on March 1, 2017
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Made me want to read everything Ghosh has written. So important for the world today. All politicians across the world need to read this as an intro to their job.
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I. Black
5.0 out of 5 stars Profound, Fascinating and Wise
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 24, 2012
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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.
9 people found this helpful
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