Lecture Summaries: 
12 November, 2003

Back to PEF Main Pages

Richard Pococke in the Lebanon
by
J.R. Bartlett
Editor, Palestine Exploration Quarterly
Fellow Emeritus of Trinity College, Dublin

 The Irish bishop Richard Pococke (1704-65) travelled widely in the Near East and Europe in 1737-38, and left an important two-volume account entitled Description of the East and some other Countries (published 1743, 1745).  This lecture introduced Pococke (who was not as dull as the diarist Mrs. Delaney thought), and set him in the context of other eighteenth-century scholarly travellers to the east, such as Cornelis de Bruyn, Henry Maundrell, and Thomas Shaw.  The lecture traced that part of Pococke's journey which lay through Lebanon, identifying the places he visited along the coast (e.g., Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, Jebail), in the mountains (especially north of the Nahr el-Kelb and the Qadisha valley), and in the Bedaa valley, where Pococke spent some time at Baalbek before moving on to Damascus.  His work at Baalbek was compared with that of Robert Wood a few years later.  Pococke's journey was illustrated from nineteenth-century engravings of W.H. Bartlett and David Roberts and from modern photographs.