It's Edward William Lane's Birthday Again

On September 17, 1801, in Hereford, England, Edward William Lane was born. 146 years later, I was born. I believe I have noted this annually since 2009, when this blog began. If I must share my birthday, I could do far worse.

Generations of English-speaking Arabists have used Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon, an immense dictionary of the classical language based on the classical Arabic Qamus. He died while working on the letter qaf (someone I knew once joked he might have been working on the word qadr: only the Arabic-speakers will get it), and his nephew finished the eight-volume work, but it's much weaker after the qafs. At one time his translation of the Arabian Nights was widely read; it is more readable than Sir Richard Burton's, but Burton's has generally superseded it in popularity. (Burton, unlike Lane, kept the dirty parts in, but he wrote in a style that at times verges on the unreadably pretentious, and, being a late Victorian, made up his own dirty words to translate the Arabic ones, since the standard English ones couldn't be printed. Off the top of my head, I remember "futter" if you want an example. It helps if you know French.) Lane's Nights notes are a fantastic treasure of Arab daily life, while Burton's notes have a whole lot of detail on less savory aspects of the culture. Read both. Or read both their notes, and a modern translation of the text.

But Lane's first work is the one that will always endear him to me, and I think, to anyone who loves Egypt, umm al-dunya. This is The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians.
Lane was an "orientalist" before Edward Said taught us that that was a bad word, but he was also one of the earliest, and one of the best and most scrupulous in his scholarship.

Manners and Customs is a great book: dated to be sure, after a century and three quarters; quaint at times in its attitudes and curious in its transliterations of Arabic, but still a gem of description of another culture by a man who managed to learn a great deal by living within it. It was first published in 1836, after years of gestation. I still have, and often refer to, the Everyman's Library edition I picked up in Beirut in 1972; the paper dust cover is even still intact. An earlier version of the Everyman's edition is available in full text on Google Books, as are some other editions, so you don't need to rely on a paper copy as I did. (Though if you want a paper copy, it's still in print.)
It is one of those books that cannot be excerpted with any utility: it's the small joys that make it so interesting, and it may be a complete wash for those who've never been in Egypt. It's the flashes of recognition of continuities and the clear evidence of change and evolution that make it interesting. I have favorite sections and passages, but can't find one that would represent the whole. But there are few, if any, other works of the period by Western orientalists that so neatly encapsulate a country and its culture. There are, certainly, plenty of descriptions of Damascus and Istanbul and other cities by diplomats and historians and linguists, but Lane was more of an anthropologist than anything else, although I don't think the word had been coined then, except perhaps for physical anthropology: this is cultural anthropology before the words existed. He captured Egypt in the later years of Muhammad ‘Ali's reign, but also provided descriptions of practices and habits that long predated his era, and many of which survive today. But he also captured a great deal that does not survive today, and that is part of the book's charm and importance. Most Arabic authors of the time were recording the events and institutions of the ruling classes; Lane was out there with the folks in the coffeehouses and local gathering places and mosques. He captured Egypt at the human level better than any Arabic author of the 19th century that I know of: probably better than any author prior to Naguib Mahfouz, who finally gave an Egyptian voice to ordinary Egyptians.
Lane also was part of a dynasty of sorts. His sister, Sophia Lane Poole, wrote a work on women in Egypt (some at least of which was provided by her brother, apparently), and his nephew, Stanley Lane-Poole (he added a hyphen apparently), an Arabic scholar in his own right, finished the Arabic-English Lexicon and wrote many popular historical and cultural works on the Middle East, some of which still have value, but none of which equal his uncle's contribution.
So happy 216th birthday, Edward William Lane, and thanks for Manners and Customs, and the indispensable Lexicon of course, and your version of the Nights. But it's Manners and Customs that makes me happiest to share your birthday.

Edward William Lane's 214th Birthday

Edward William Lane

The great pioneer anthropologist and lexicographer Edward William Lane was born on this day in 1801, as I believe I have noted every year since I started blogging.

Lane's works, cited fully in the link above, give us a superb description of Egypt in the Muhammad  ‘Ali era, while his Arabic-English Lexicon remains unmatched in English for Classical Arabic. I annually note his birthday for those reasons and because I share the date, though I am rather younger than he.

Happy 213th Birthday to Edward William Lane

Longtime readers will recall that every year on September 17,  I note the birthday of Edward William Lane (1801-1876), the author of The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon, a translation of the Arabian Nights, and Cairo 50 Years Ago (edited by his nephew, Stanley Lane-Poole). Manners and Customs remains an essential description of daily life in Egypt in the age of Muhammad ‘Ali, and the Lexicon is unique in English. Lane, his sister Sophia Lane Poole and nephew Stanley Lane-Poole (with a hyphen unlike his mother) formed a sort of dynasty of British writers on Egypt, Arabic, and Islam.

As an old Cairo hand, I am privileged to share a birthday with Lane, so I always make note of his. Unlike him, I am not (yet) 213.

I believe all of Lane's works are now available online through Google Books, Internet Archive, etc., and earlier posts have linked to most. may not previously have linked to his nephew Stanley's Life of Edward William Lane, so  I add that this year.

Speaking of E.W. Lane: Lane on the Ghawazi (Ghawazee) of Cairo

I noted earlier today that it was Edward William Lane's birthday and commented at some length on his master work, The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. As an example of his observational skills, and since the work is in the public domain, I thought I'd reproduce the entirety of his Chapter XIX, "Public Dancers." This deals mostly with the ghawazi, which he spells ghawazee, a separate tribelike group who danced professionally in public and who are often considered an important element in the various dance traditions that came together to create the Egyptian belly-dancing tradition, now seemingly a dying art in the country of its birth.

You can find a modern discussion of the history of the ghawazi (singular, ghaziyya) at Wikipedia; that article places their origin among the Dom or gypsies of the Middle East. Some descendants of the 19th century ghawazi are said to still exist in the Qena and Luxor regions of Upper Egypt, and aspects of their costume (particularly the vest) are still echoed by belly-dancers today. I've often thought of discussing the history of the raqs sharqi or belly-dance on this blog, and perhaps this post can serve as an inaugural post in the series.

Lane's description of the ghawazi remains the classic one;  he also illustrated the ghawazi, but was not primarily an artist. Other, better painters also noted the ghawazi, including the great Orientalist painter David Roberts:

David Roberts: Ghawazee of Cairo

And the later French Orientalist artist Jean-Léon Gérôme, fond of harem scenes:

 Also from Gérôme:

But since Lane's account is widely considered  a classic and is now in the public domain, let me reproduce it here in full (click to enlarge the images to make them more readable):

A photo (postcard?) of a ghaziyya, c. 1906:

It's Edward William Lane's 212th Birthday

Edward William Lane

Once again, as I do every year, I pause to note that it is Edward William Lane's birthday. He would be 212 today. I've posted about Lane many times, especially on his birthday which I happen by a stroke of luck to share. His huge Arabic-English Lexicon remains a major tool; his translation of the Arabian Nights may have been superseded but still has valuable notes; but Lane's greatest work remains The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, the classic description of life in Cairo in the reign of Muhammad ‘Ali. A great work of cultural anthropology before the field existed, it still repays reading.

Manners and Customs is dated, but that's part of the point: it preserves a glimpse of everyday life in Egypt at a time when Egyptian chroniclers were mostly preoccupied with the doings of the rulers. If you know Egypt today you should read it. Besides, you have no excuse not to, since you can find it online free from Google Books.

A happy 212th to Lane.

And a Happy Edward William Lane's Birthday

Today is not only the first day of Rosh Hashona, it is also Edward William Lane's birthday. 

Longtime readers know that Lane's birthday is celebrated annually on this blog. The man born in Hereford, England, on September 17, 1801, gave us the richest anthropological description of Egypt in the age of Muhammad Ali (The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians) and the hefty eight-volume Lane's Lexicon, the fullest Arabic-English dictionary of the classical language, not to mention a version of the Arabian Nights, with extensive cultural notes. Lane was perhaps the first truly great English Arabist, and founded a dynasty that included his sister Sophia Lane Poole, who wrote about women in Egypt, and his nephew, Sophia's son Stanley Lane-Poole (who acquired a hyphen somewhere), who wrote widely on Arab and Islamic history.

I posted on his birthday in 2009, 2010, and 2011, and on the Lane dynasty here,

His contributions to anthropology/sociology (Manners and Customs), literature (1,001 Nights), and linguistics (the Arabic-English Lexicon) would make his birthday worth noting, even if, 146 years after Lane, I hadn't come along to share the birthday.

For much more detail, please see the earlier posts. And let's dance with the Ghawazi (or Ghawazee as Lane spelled it), whose sensual public dances, said to be one origin of the belly dance, so shocked Lane's Victorian (and pre-Victorian) sensibilities, that he wrote (at great length) about them, and provided illustrations. Happy birthday, Ed:

Khamsin Blowing in Cairo Today

Tahrir Square is Said to Be in There Somewhere

It's April in Egypt, the time of year when the Sahara desert sometimes drops in to the Nile Valley for a visit.The caption — the photo's from Zeinobia's blog — claims the above shows Tahrir Square. I'll have to take their word for it. It's the Khamsin, the sandstorms that blow in spring from the West, and this looks like one of the really bad examples.

Edward William Lane's great Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians says the Khamsin (Arabic for "fifty") can blow from the day after Coptic Easter until Pentecost, hence the name. There are other etymologies, but that one will do. The day after Coptic Easter (Sham al-Nasim) was Monday.

My first year in Egypt we experienced a really bad Khamsin like the one in the photo, exacerbated by the fact that one of my flatmates thought it was stuffy and decided to open the windows. Sand, of course, was everywhere.

At least it should cool down the political heat over the Presidential disqualifications. Who's going to demonstrate in that?

It's Edward William Lane's Birthday Again: Happy 210th!

Edward William Lane

Tomorrow, September 17, marks Edward William Lane's birthday yet again. This time it will be his 210th. As I've noted each year, I'm lucky enough as a fan of Egypt and Cairo to share a birthday with the author of The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon, a translation if the Arabian Nights, and more. (I am not, however, 210, though I will admit I'll be playing one particular track by Lennon and McCartney from the Sergeant Pepper album more than usual.)

For more on Lane, see the link above (noted again last year) and my comments on the Lane corpus (including his sister's and nephew's books) in my recent post on Cairo in the 19th century.

One of the more famous sections of Manners and Customs  is Lane's description of the ghawazi (he spells it Ghawazee) or class of dancing girls (seen by some as the ancestors of the belly dance) whose immoral (his characterization) performances he describes in sufficient detail to suggest that, despite his expressed distaste for their behavior, he studied them closely out of his devotion to anthropological knowledge, so I'll celebrate with his image of their dance. Happy 210th, Ed:

Cairo in the 19th Century: Essential Readings

 I'm on vacation this week. Lest my loyal readers storm the Bastille, I've prepared, ahead of time, a series of rather lengthy posts on historical and cultural subjects unlikely to be overtaken by events, one or more of which will automatically go up daily. Should something really earth-shattering happen (e.g. Ayman al-Zawahiri decides to practice medicine again),  I may check in live, but otherwise I hope these posts both entertain and inform.

From Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians

When I introduced my Cairo History Series of posts last month, I did so with a list of what I deemed five essential books for understanding the overall history of Cairo, from its pharaonic predecessor cities to its hectic present. Now I intend to move on to closer looks at essential works on earlier periods, beginning with the 19th century.

This is not intended as an exhaustive bibliography. In the 19th century Cairo became a stop on the European Grand Tour, especially after the Khedive Isma‘il spruced the place up for the opening of the Suez Canal. Memoirs and letters of one's "Oriental" tour to Egypt and the Holy Land were legion; everybody from British Maiden Ladies to Gustave Flaubert passed through, and after 1882 we also have a whole series of British civil servants' memoirs. That's not what I'm talking about here; that was European Cairo, the city of Imperial administration. Those works mostly are filtered through the conversations at High Tea in the European hotels and clubs (the maiden ladies and the civil servants at least; Flaubert was recording the brothels); that's not the essential Cairo I'm talking about here. If you're interested in their Cairo, you can check out Trevor Mostyn's 2006 Egypt's Belle Epoque: Cairo in the Age of the Hedonists (Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2006) for a good account, though there have been many. For the multiple travelers, the Travelers in the Middle East Archive website is useful. That literature is entertaining and important for imperial history, and is a part of the city's past. But I want to drill down to the street level.

I am also making`an assumption that all my readers read English (if not, what do you think this is?), and that substantial numbers read Arabic and French, the native language and the cultural language of 19th century Egypt respectively. (Well, there was also the Court Language, Ottoman Turkish, but it wasn't used in books in Egypt at the time.)  If there are any great works by Hungarian or Japanese visitors, they are opaque to me, but I also haven't heard of any.

So here are my (again five, but I may vary the number in the future) "essential" selections:

1. The Déscription de l'Égypte. Conveniently, I just blogged about the Déscription de l'Égypte earlier this month, and linked to the Biliotheca Alexandrina's wonderful if somewhat clunky online access to the text and plates. It isn't particularly Cairo-heavy; it includes a lot of botanical, astronomical, and other descriptions, but the Atlas volume contains a great map of Cairo and environs, and the plates include the first really well drafted plans of many of the mosques and monuments. Based on the information gathered in Napoleon's expedition of 1798-1801, it appeared in 20 volumes from 1809 to 1829. (Other artists also recorded the life and monuments of Egypt in subsequent years, perhaps most famously David Roberts.)

Edward William Lane

2. Edward William Lane, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. Longtime readers may know that every September 17 (which I'm sure you all honor as the birthday of Edward William Lane), I put up my original post from 2009 on the man who created one of the great classics of cultural description. He was a pioneer Orientalist before that became a bad word, a pioneering cultural anthropologist at a time when the word anthropologist meant only physical anthropology. I post every year on his birthday because I am proud to say we share the same birthday. Lane also wrote the huge and irreplaceable Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon and a once-popular translation of the 1001 Nights (far more readable than Sir Richard Burton's better known version, but without all the salacious notes), but Cairo-lovers know him for Manners and Customs, which was published in the 1830s..

If you didn't already click through to the link, here's the real take-away from that post on Manners and Customs:

Manners and Customs is a great book: dated to be sure, after a century and three quarters; quaint at times in its attitudes and curious in its transliterations of Arabic, but still a gem of description of another culture by a man who managed to learn a great deal by living within it. It was first published in 1836, after years of gestation. I still have, and often refer to, the Everyman's Library edition I picked up in Beirut in 1972; the paper dust cover is even still intact. An earlier version of the Everyman's edition is available in full text on Google Books, [2011 Note: This link now takes you to a free online Google e-book] as are some other editions, so you don't need to rely on a paper copy as I did. (Though if you want a paper copy, it's still in print.)

It is one of those books that cannot be excerpted with any utility: it's the small joys that make it so interesting, and it may be a complete wash for those who've never been in Egypt. It's the flashes of recognition of continuities and the clear evidence of change and evolution that make it interesting. I have favorite sections and passages, but can't find one that would represent the whole. But there are few, if any, other works of the period by Western orientalists that so neatly encapsulate a country and its culture. There are, certainly, plenty of descriptions of Damascus and Istanbul and other cities by diplomats and historians and linguists, but Lane was more of an anthropologist than anything else, although I don't think the word had been coined then, except perhaps for physical anthropology: this is cultural anthropology before the words existed. He captured Egypt in the later years of Muhammad ‘Ali's reign, but also provided descriptions of practices and habits that long predated his era, and many of which survive today. But he also captured a great deal that does not survive today, and that is part of the book's charm and importance. Most Arabic authors of the time were recording the events and institutions of the ruling classes; Lane was out there with the folks in the coffeehouses and local gathering places and mosques. He captured Egypt at the human level better than any Arabic author of the 19th century that I know of: probably better than any author prior to Naguib Mahfouz, who finally gave an Egyptian voice to ordinary Egyptians.

3. Lane, Cairo Fifty Years Ago. Manners and Customs, though Holy Scripture to some (well, mostly me), is a description of just what its title says: a great picture of daily life in Egypt, from home life to trade to religious practices to superstition. It is not a description of Cairo per se, but a picture of how Egyptians lived in the reign of Muhammad ‘Ali. Lane intended to expand it (he did update his first edition once I believe), and had written several chapters describing the city, its streets, neighborhoods, markets, etc. He didn't see it published in his lifetime, but in 1896 his nephew and literary heir, Stanley Lane-Poole, published it as Cairo Fifty Years Ago. Though not as polished as Lane might have liked to see it, it's a valuable work, and it, too, is available as a Google E-book free of charge, if you don't mind reading online.

6. The Lane Extended-Family Franchise. Lane wasn't just a great man; he was a franchise. Just as a lot of novels today with Tom Clancy's name on them are written by somebody else "with" Tom Clancy, Lane's extended family first wrote with him and later succeeded him. I mentioned Stanley Lane-Poole above. His mother, Sophia Lane Poole (no hyphen; that was born with Stanley apparently), also spent time in Egypt and wrote The Englishwoman in Egypt: Letters from Cairo During a Residence There in 1832, 3, and 4, With E.W. Lane, Esq., Author of the "Modern Egyptians." Note, in keeping with my Clancy comparison, the "with." Sophia's work, originally in two volumes and available free as a Google e-Book for online reading, is about women's lives in Cairo. The "with E. W. Lane, Esq." has led some critics to conclude that parts of the book may contain information that Lane acquired in his researches but which neither Muslim Egyptian nor early Victorian English mores would have seemed proper for a man to publish; or perhaps Sophia really did all the research herself. Stanley, once he had acquired that hyphen, became a prolific literary heir to his uncle. He finished the Arabic-English Lexicon after his uncle died while working on the qafs, edited Cairo Fifty Years Ago,  and wrote numerous works on Egyptian history, on Cairo (also a free Google e-Book), on Islam, and other topics. He remains both a scholar in his own right and an important popularizer, but not the pioneer his uncle was. Many of his works have been supplanted by later scholarship; Manners and Customs cannot be.

5. ‘Ali Pasha Mubarak, Al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiyya al-Jadida li-Misr al-Qahira. This is for the hardcore Cairo buffs. First, it's never been translated from Arabic; second, I doubt it ever will be. (Modern Arabic editions don't sell well: even Cairenes aren't this interested in the history of their city.) It is, however, a document that may rank even above the Déscription de l'Égypte and Manners and Customs. It's not for everyone. It's for the obsessives. For the hikers, the walkers, the monument stalkers, the people who want to know what's down that alley, and why it's there, and what's that little shrine/tomb thing at the end? It works for me, but it won't work for everyone.

‘Ali Mubarak Pasha

Let's start with the title. The author(s) of the current Wikipedia entry on Mubarak Pasha translate Al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiyya as "Tawfiq's New Plans." This is a bit like some of those Chinese machine translations everyone likes to make fun of: it's a literal translation of the words in contemporary Arabic, but it misses the Pasha's point entirely. Actually, "Tawfiq's New Plats" would come closer, since in this case it doesn't mean a plan in the future planning-sense, but in the mapping sense (the basic root has to do with drawing lines); but even that misses the real point. ‘Ali Pasha Mubarak was evoking the greatest work ever written on the topography of Cairo (and coming up in this series, you can bet on it), 14th Century Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi's indispensable Al Mawa'iz wa al-I‘tibar bi Dhikr al-Khitat wa al-Athar. As usual the title is burdened with words to create a rhyme, but it's usually just called the Khitat al-Maqrizi, with Khitat here being the old word used for the laid-out-quartered (thus both planned and platted) in the foundation of Cairo. Maqrizi described medieval Cairo in elaborate detail. ‘Ali Pasha Mubarak set out to do a new Khitat for the era of Khedive Tawfiq, hence, Al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiyya.

If you don't read Arabic there's little I can do. The work is divided into those parts that were there in Maqrizi's day and those that were newer, and describes the city street by street. The organization is not geographical exactly, but deals with each area's streets, alleys, (various subsets of alleys), mosques, etc. It is both a catalog and a wondrous record of an age.


But for those who do, it's a marvelous resource. The old original Bulaq edition, in several volumes, can even be found at archive.org and other places on the Internet. (Google الخطط التوفيقية. Cut and paste if you need to.) The Bulaq edition, however, is awfully hard to read as it has only topic dividers, not paragraph breaks. If you can find one of the 20th century editions (Dar al-Ma‘arif did one in the 1980s, and I understand there's a more recent one), you'll find it much easier to read.

Edward William Lane's Birthday

Today's my birthday. I'm not trolling for presents or congratulations by mentioning this (though at 62 I gather I can start to get some "senior" discounts), and that's not a picture of me either, but I'm using a coincidence to introduce one of the great figures of Arabic scholarship in the West, with whom I happen to share the date. The guy in the picture is 208 today.

Everybody shares their birthday with something or somebody: there are at most 366 possible dates, after all, and the February 29 folks don't get a lot of birthdays. September 17 happens to be the date of the completion of the US Constitution (September 17, 1787, "Constitution Day"), the date of the bloodiest single day in American military history (Antietam, September 17, 1862), and it also has — this is how I get to introduce my birthday into a Middle East blog — a couple of Middle Eastern resonances as well. One was September 17, 1948, my first birthday, but since nobody knew I'd have anything to do with the Middle East at the time, the main event was the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN's peace envoy, in Jerusalem by LEHI (the "Stern Gang"). The other Middle Eastern connection is the reason for this post.

On September 17, 1801, in Hereford, England, Edward William Lane was born.

Generations of English-speaking Arabists have used Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon, an immense dictionary of the classical language based on the classical Arabic Qamus. He died while working on the letter qaf (someone I knew once joked he might have been working on the word qadr: only the Arabic-speakers will get it), and his nephew finished the eight-volume work, but it's much weaker after the qafs. At one time his translation of the Arabian Nights was widely read; it is more readable than Sir Richard Burton's, but Burton's has generally superseded it in popularity. (Burton, unlike Lane, kept the dirty parts in, but he wrote in a style that at times verges on the unreadably pretentious, and, being a late Victorian, made up his own dirty words to translate the Arabic ones, since the standard English ones couldn't be printed. Off the top of my head, I remember "futter" if you want an example. It helps if you know French.) Lane's Nights notes are a fantastic treasure of Arab daily life, while Burton's notes have a whole lot of detail on less savory aspects of the culture. Read both. Or read both their notes, and a modern translation of the text.

But Lane's first work is the one that will always endear him to me, and I think, to anyone who loves Egypt, umm al-dunya. This is The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians.

Lane was an "orientalist" before Edward Said taught us that that was a bad word, but he was also one of the earliest, and one of the best and most scrupulous in his scholarship.

Manners and Customs is a great book: dated to be sure, after a century and three quarters; quaint at times in its attitudes and curious in its transliterations of Arabic, but still a gem of description of another culture by a man who managed to learn a great deal by living within it. It was first published in 1836, after years of gestation. I still have, and often refer to, the Everyman's Library edition I picked up in Beirut in 1972; the paper dust cover is even still intact. An earlier version of the Everyman's edition is available in full text on Google Books, as are some other editions, so you don't need to rely on a paper copy as I did. (Though if you want a paper copy, it's still in print.)

It is one of those books that cannot be excerpted with any utility: it's the small joys that make it so interesting, and it may be a complete wash for those who've never been in Egypt. It's the flashes of recognition of continuities and the clear evidence of change and evolution that make it interesting. I have favorite sections and passages, but can't find one that would represent the whole. But there are few, if any, other works of the period by Western orientalists that so neatly encapsulate a country and its culture. There are, certainly, plenty of descriptions of Damascus and Istanbul and other cities by diplomats and historians and linguists, but Lane was more of an anthropologist than anything else, although I don't think the word had been coined then, except perhaps for physical anthropology: this is cultural anthropology before the words existed. He captured Egypt in the later years of Muhammad ‘Ali's reign, but also provided descriptions of practices and habits that long predated his era, and many of which survive today. But he also captured a great deal that does not survive today, and that is part of the book's charm and importance. Most Arabic authors of the time were recording the events and institutions of the ruling classes; Lane was out there with the folks in the coffeehouses and local gathering places and mosques. He captured Egypt at the human level better than any Arabic author of the 19th century that I know of: probably better than any author prior to Naguib Mahfouz, who finally gave an Egyptian voice to ordinary Egyptians.

Lane also was part of a dynasty of sorts. His sister, Sophia Lane Poole, wrote a work on women in Egypt (some at least of which was provided by her brother, apparently), and his nephew, Stanley Lane-Poole (he added a hyphen apparently), an Arabic scholar in his own right, finished the Arabic-English Lexicon and wrote many popular historical and cultural works on the Middle East, some of which still have value, but none of which equal his uncle's contribution.

So happy 208th birthday, Edward William Lane, and thanks for Manners and Customs, and the indipensable Lexicon of course, and your version of the Nights. But it's Manners and Customs that makes me happiest to share your birthday.

Oh, yes: if posts are few today, it's both my birthday and I've got a ton of work (you know, the kind they actually pay me for) to finish. Click on the Google Books link and read Lane for a while, if you get bored. Believe me, it's worth the journey.