Curious and Convivial Traveller

de Usick P.

In 2001 the British Museum acquired the first of two ancient Egyptian stelae from the collection of the traveller Edward Roger Pratt (1789-1863) of Ryston Hall, Norfolk, and discovered his 1832-34 unpublished journals for Greece and Egypt and the 136-page album with his own drawings, watercolours, and paper impressions of bas-reliefs from a solo Nile voyage to the Second Cataract. Pratt recorded ancient monuments and sites, many later damaged or destroyed. In Greece Pratt travelled widely and adventurously with scholarly architects and artists studying ancient Greek sites, while in Egypt his guides were the works of the French Egyptologists Jean-François Champollion and Dominique Vivant Denon. A gregarious and enthusiastic traveller, Pratt was supported by extensive consular networks, expatriate communities and other travellers. In this volume his life and travels are reconstructed from his many journals, the travel journals for Greece and Egypt are transcribed and annotated, his maps and plans reproduced, his dispersed antiquities collection reconstructed, and the album drawings are identified and published in colour.