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Lady Arbuthnot's Chamber (Question)


Scott Creighton

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I can see Scott's and SWoH's point - but I think that Vyse was surely more likely to describe someone by their social position than their dress ...

Would Hekekyan have donned Arab dress to be formally introduced to Vyse on a hot May Saturday evening in Cairo ... ?

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3 minutes ago, Windowpane said:

I can see Scott's and SWoH's point - but I think that Vyse was surely more likely to describe someone by their social position than their dress ...

Would Hekekyan have donned Arab dress to be formally introduced to Vyse on a hot May Saturday evening in Cairo ... ?

Maybe they met just after Hekekyan had had a shower and was in his bathrobe and Vyse was being decorous.

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1 hour ago, Sir Wearer of Hats said:

As a professional interpreter of scribbles, it looks more consistent with an “R” rather than a “N” to me.

But the b is not a completed b, but a crossed ascender: a t.

As I said, nearest to what Vyse actually wrote is “roted”.  Could “roted” be used in the sense “learned”?  I find no support for the conjecture.

Look at “Chamber” (in “Nelson’s Chamber”).  It looks more like “Chapler”.  There is a lot of this in the journal, which was evidently written in a tearing hurry.  Sometime his characters are reduced to a series of loops, like tiny children produce when they are pretending they can do joined-up writing.

So IMO detailed autopsies are misguided and what makes sense in context counts for a lot.

I find no examples of “robed” in Operations and just one of “noted” in the relevant sense.

M.

Edited by mstower
To change a dash to a colon.
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57 minutes ago, Windowpane said:

Would Hekekyan have donned Arab dress to be formally introduced to Vyse on a hot May Saturday evening in Cairo ... ?

An Armenian is not an Arab.  Hekekyan was Western-educated and all indications are that he habitually wore Western dress:

64-12_2.jpg

19hekekyan1.JPG

M.

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2 hours ago, Sir Wearer of Hats said:

As a professional interpreter of scribbles, it looks more consistent with an “R” rather than a “N” to me.

No. If you look at the top figure of post 142, then you will see that what one may perceive as the left part of the o is actually the second leg of the n. It appears that he joined both letters n and o into one scribble.

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Whether or not this was Hekekyan, we are told that the person in question had been educated in England and spoke good English.

So the question is, how would an English-educated Armenian, dining with two Englishmen, dress?

M.

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56 minutes ago, mstower said:

Whether or not this was Hekekyan, we are told that the person in question had been educated in England and spoke good English.

So the question is, how would an English-educated Armenian, dining with two Englishmen, dress?

M.

In formal evening dress, I believe, particularly since he'd been educated in England and there doesn't appear to be any evidence that he's "gone native" while in Egypt.

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54 minutes ago, mstower said:

So the question is, how would an English-educated Armenian, dining with two Englishmen, dress?

A English educated Native American wears a Harris sport coat with his dress uniform breeches and riding boots. :yes:

Hekekyan had a Turkish name and a Turkish "look". I'm guessing he was from Armenia but not ethnically Armenian. 

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Hekekyan

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30270663

Quote

In a characteristic case of long-distance fieldwork, British geologist Leonard Horner employed Turkish-born, English-educated, Cairo-based engineer Joseph Hekekyan to measure Nile silt deposits around pharaonic monuments in Egypt to address the chronological gap between the earliest historical and latest geological time. Their conclusion in 1858 that humans had existed in Egypt for exactly 13,371 years was the earliest attempt to apply geological stratigraphy to absolute human dates.

https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/N13867284

http://laits.utexas.edu/modern_me/egypt_content/files/muhammad-ali.pdf

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4282947?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

https://www.worldcat.org/title/hekekyan-papers-and-other-sources-for-the-survey-of-memphis/oclc/686772850

 

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19 minutes ago, Hanslune said:

Hekekyan

So I was right. He was Tujue. :yes:

 

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47 minutes ago, Piney said:

So I was right. He was Tujue. :yes:

 

Well yes they didn't have antibiotics then....B)

(He was probably some sort Turk/had Turkic blood)

 

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2 minutes ago, Hanslune said:

Well yes they didn't have antibiotics then....B)

(He was probably some sort Turk/had Turkic blood)

 

Erdogan ( who is part Armenian) likes to "whisper" that Mustafa Kemal was Slavic when he really was a type of Turk called a "Cuman" who are fair skinned probably from mixing with Uralic or Eastern Iranic folk around the Yellow River a few thousand years ago. 

But Turkey proper is as multi-cultural as the U.S. which is one of the reasons Kemal wanted to base it's structure and government the same way. 

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mstower:

Quote

An Armenian is not an Arab.  

No, but foreigners did wear Arab dress on occasion - Perring, for example.  In searing temperatures, it's much more comfortable than Western dress.  (It's difficult, though, to imagine Vyse wearing Arab dress ... )

"Hekekyan" is an Armenian name, and he was Armenian (rather than Turkish).

The only portrait of someone in Armenian robes that I've been able to find (admittedly, you can't see whether they're very flowing or not).

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22 minutes ago, Windowpane said:

mstower:

No, but foreigners did wear Arab dress on occasion - Perring, for example.  In searing temperatures, it's much more comfortable than Western dress.  (It's difficult, though, to imagine Vyse wearing Arab dress ... )

"Hekekyan" is an Armenian name, and he was Armenian (rather than Turkish).

The only portrait of someone in Armenian robes that I've been able to find (admittedly, you can't see whether they're very flowing or not).

Yes - this may be nearer to what Vyse was meaning with his 'robed Armenian' - he was wearing his native, 'national dress/costume'. It may not have been Egyptian robes.

From your link (above):

"Then I spotted him skulking along by the wall opposite, decked out in his long Armenian robes that had something of the maxi-coat about them, the fur hat covering the bald spot..."

SC

Edited by Scott Creighton
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https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=FeviPDy08e8C&pg=PA59&dq=hekekyan

Quote

. . . Hekekyan was an Istanbul-born Armenian Catholic whose education in England alienated him from his adopted Egyptian homeland. . . .

Quote

By the time Muhammad Ali finally ordered him to Egypt in 1830, the young man had become more Joseph than Yusuf.  He had forgotten his native Turkish and had to speak through an interpreter.  He was taken aback at his “disgrace in Egypt for having presumed to wear gloves and stockings.”  Hekekyan found it hard to conceal his English schoolboy prejudices: “Prosperity to the Greeks, confusion to the Turks; sound thrashings to the Monsieur frog-eaters—such were the toasts I brought to Egypt with me.”

I must say I find the idea of the heavily Anglicised Hekekyan turning up to dine with Englishman of some standing dressed like a cabaret turn in “Armenian robes” which likely he had never seen, let alone worn, grotesque—but hey-ho, it’s not the worst nonsense being pushed here.

M.

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Who knows?

Perhaps some of the local Egyptians in attendance thought Vyse's dress was also a "cabaret turn"?

SC

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12 minutes ago, Scott Creighton said:

Who knows?

Perhaps some of the local Egyptians in attendance thought Vyse's dress was also a "cabaret turn"?

SC

Not sure what your point is here, but then I’m not sure you know either.

It’s how Hekekyan and Vyse themselves would see it which matters.

Hekekyan was of Armenian descent, but he was not a native Armenian and as far as we know, he never once went there.  He lived in Istanbul, then England, and by the time he arrived in Egypt, he had spent more than half of his life in England.  He had not the least reason to wear “Armenian national costume”.

Vyse wore what he was used to wearing.

Hekekyan wore what he was used to wearing.

What the servants might think was of no great account to them.

M.

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Personally, I think Armenian robes and fur hats would be just too much for a sultry evening in Egypt.  Egyptian (Arab) dress would be more comfortable ... but, as Kenemet says:

Quote

In formal evening dress, I believe, particularly since he'd been educated in England and there doesn't appear to be any evidence that he's "gone native" while in Egypt.

 

Which would have taken precedence with Hekekyan: the need to be comfortable, or the need to impress the wealthy and influential Colonel Vyse with Hekekyan's own Englishness, having been educated there ... ?

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20 minutes ago, Windowpane said:

Which would have taken precedence with Hekekyan: the need to be comfortable, or the need to impress the wealthy and influential Colonel Vyse with Hekekyan's own Englishness, having been educated there ... ?

We have to ask why Hekekyan would dine with Brettell at all, if he did not value English company and English manners and even English food.

For someone who had spent twelve or thirteen formative years in England and “spoke good English”, the opportunity to converse in English would be something.

Manner of dress would be part of the package.

And again, all indications are that he continued to dress essentially as he had learnt to dress in England, adding only fez or tarbush, the symbol of Ottoman authority.  The fez itself was a product of clothing reform and a quite recent innovation, postdating his going to England:

https://trc-leiden.nl/trc-digital-exhibition/index.php/from-kaftan-to-kippa/item/54-fez-and-tarbush

M.

Edited by mstower
To fix a typo.
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10 hours ago, mstower said:

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=FeviPDy08e8C&pg=PA59&dq=hekekyan

I must say I find the idea of the heavily Anglicised Hekekyan turning up to dine with Englishman of some standing dressed like a cabaret turn in “Armenian robes” which likely he had never seen, let alone worn, grotesque—but hey-ho, it’s not the worst nonsense being pushed here.

M.

I mean its interesting but it appears to be more of these interminable, 'what type of shoes do angel wear when dancing on the top of a pin'. I mean with the poor handwriting you have to work with this type of squabbling can go on for generations....chuckle

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13 hours ago, Windowpane said:

No, but foreigners did wear Arab dress on occasion - Perring, for example.  In searing temperatures, it's much more comfortable than Western dress.  (It's difficult, though, to imagine Vyse wearing Arab dress ... )

Certainly it was known for the younger and bolder to adopt “Eastern” costume for its practicality and to some extent anonymity, but would they wear it for more formal occasions?

M.

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23 minutes ago, mstower said:

Certainly it was known for the younger and bolder to adopt “Eastern” costume for its practicality and to some extent anonymity, but would they wear it for more formal occasions?

 

 

I imagine the requirement for formality overrode considerations of comfort ... even though the weather at this time was particularly hot, as Vyse remarks: over 90o  in the tombs, even at night.  The temperatures eventually forced the Arbuthnots to retreat to Cairo.

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On 5/30/2019 at 2:36 PM, mstower said:

But the b is not a completed b, but a crossed ascender: a t.

As I said, nearest to what Vyse actually wrote is “roted”.  Could “roted” be used in the sense “learned”?  I find no support for the conjecture.

Learning by rote is to learn something by memorizing it totally and completely, often through force of repetition—like learning multiplication tables. 

I’ve seen it used transitively in Renaissance settings, but not in anything modern. It’s still grammatically and semantically correct. 

—Jaylemurph  

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Vyse lower letter 'b' comparison:

Zk5WePk.jpg

SC

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