This print is from 'The Military Costume of Turkey. Illustrated by A Series of Engravings. From Drawings made on the Spot. Dedicated by Permission to His Excellency the Minister of the Ottoman Porte to his Britannic Majesty.'
London, Published by Thomas M'Lean, Haymarket, (1818). Folio. One of 29 fine handcoloured aquatint plates . Very light offsetting from plates. The original accompanying text of this print is as follows:
The remote provinces of the Turkish empire pay little more than a nominal subjection to the Porte, whose commands meet with attention, in Egypt, no longer than the chiefs who govern it find their own interest concerned in obeying them. In such countries, therefore, the traveller must venture with the greatest circumspection, when the firman of the Porte is his only safeguard, which is often either doubted or held in contempt by the ignorant chief or his rapacious subalterns, whose enmity to the Christian faith is ever alive, and whose dread of magic keeps the worst suspicions awake. The firman is therefore of little use here, compared to what it is in European Turkey. The annexed subjects represents a military chief attendant on an Aga of Upper Egypt...
Category
18th Century British Antique John Skinner Prout, N.W.S. Furniture