How Old is Tourism?


Tourism, mass tourism, it seem like new words we just have invented - or is it so?

Before I moved to Egypt some friends who work in the film industry asked me for help. There was a new production they just had started to work on, and a main "person" in the movie was a necklace from ancient Egypt. They asked me if I could find something that looked real, as it would be a lot of close-ups of the necklace - so it had to be good.

When I went to Egypt again two weeks later I asked my friends in Luxor where I could get the top copies that where sold as original items. No problem was the instant answer, so when the evening came we drove up in the villages of the ancient "city of the dead".

Here I got the small blue and turquoise pieces that should make up the necklace and in the end we where only missing the central piece. I told them it should be a scarab, but it had to be a unique piece of work.

One of the household left us and we where offered three rounds of chai (tea the "Egyptian way") before he returned with a big smile and a piece wrapped in a white textile which he handed me. Unwrapping it I found a truly beautiful scarab - and with my years of study of the Ancient Egyptian culture I instantly had to say: "but we can't use this one, it's an original".

The messenger laughed and said: "oh don't worry, it's not an original, it's only a copy made for Roman tourists - we don't make so good copies today".

There I had unwrapped and had in my hands a copy of a pharaonic scarab, made for tourists some 2000 years ago.

Some hundred meters down the road the twenty meters high statues of Pharaoh AmenHotep II were standing. Oh, you did not hear about them before? Then maybe you know them by their "new" name given by Greek tourists: the "Colossus of Memnon"?

These huge statues were famous as they where "singing" (a sound maybe created by wind - until this vanished during restoration work later) - so the Greek tourists of the antiquity saw them as an elegy for the Trojan hero Memnon.

If you want to know more about ancient tourism, then this is an excellent overview of the History of Tourism.

The copyright of the article How Old is Tourism? in Professional Travel is owned by Arnvid Aakre. Permission to republish How Old is Tourism? in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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