Journey from Tanzania to the Med
GEOGRAPHY, history, archaeology, exploration – all featured prominently in Peter Drake’s talk to Holme Valley Civic Society as he described a journey from Tanzania northwards to the Mediterranean Sea.
The island of Zanzibar, off the east coast of Tanzania, was where the great 19th century explorers landed before going inland. Some, including John Hanning Speke and Richard Francis Burton, were sent by the Royal Geographical Society to explore central Africa. Speke led an expedition in 1858 to Lake Tanganyika and, in the same year, was the first European to discover the largest lake in Africa, which he named Lake Victoria in honour of the British queen.
Sir Stanley Baker explored Uganda, which was very fertile and important for the growing of papyrus but, being plagued by mosquitoes, was also very unhealthy in parts. In the west of the country Baker discovered lakes which he called after members of the British royal family – Lake Albert, Lake Edward and Lake George – and for which he received a knighthood.
Thompson, a 19th century botanist sent to Africa by the Natural History Museum, explored widely in Kenya. Thompson’s Falls and the Thompson gazelle are named after him. A century later Richard Leakey, a British archaeologist and paleontologist, carried out research into human ancestry in Africa, discovering skulls of early man in northern Kenya.
The Orthodox Christians form the largest religious group in Ethiopia, a country of many contrasts including landscape, climate, language and lifestyle. The rock-hewn churches of Lalibela and their old hand-written scriptures with beautifully painted illustrations are the jewel in Ethiopia’s crown. It is in Ethiopia too that the Blue Nile leaves Lake Tana and flows to meet the White Nile in Sudan, Africa’s largest country, where there are more pyramids to be found than in Egypt.
Egypt, the most northerly country on this journey, is renowned for its ancient tombs and temples, many visible from the River Nile, the Great Highway. There is Abu Simbel, the site of two rock-cut temples of Pharaoh Rameses II, dismantled, moved and reassembled on higher ground in the 1960s to avoid the rising waters of Lake Nasser, resulting from the construction of the Aswan High Dam.
The temples of Karnak and Luxor, the Valley of the Kings and the pyramids all highlight a once-great ancient civilisation. The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in Egypt’s Western Delta in 1799 led to the deciphering of the hieroglyphic script by Jean-Francois Champollion since the three scripts on the stone, in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek, conveyed the same information.
The journey’s end was at Alexandria on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, where some of the remains of the Greco-Roman city founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC still stand.
The next meeting of Holme Valley Civic Society will take place in Holmfirth Civic Hall at 7.30pm on Thursday March 21 when historian and author Pamela Cooksey will talk about Schools and School Days in the New Mill Valley. All welcome.
