Travels in Ethiopia, above the second cataract of the Nile — Reading Companion

Bazaar Transactions and Social Codes

Hoskins devotes considerable attention to the bazaars of Dongolah, where he finds a system of commerce that reverses European expectations. Sellers are reluctant to name a price; instead, buyers must make an offer, and if it is too low, the merchant responds with the phrase Eftah Allah—“May God open your eyes.” Hoskins recounts his own attempt to buy a pipe, noting the seller’s embarrassment and the pressure from other merchants, until the author’s feigned departure finally extracts a price—twice the article’s value. Such scenes are rendered with a novelistic eye for awkwardness and cultural difference.

He also records the auction of clothes in the street, where the auctioneer walks calling aloud, and the owner may bid on his own goods. The crowd’s variety—Turks, Caireens, Dongoloue, Bishareen, Ababde, Shageea—forms what he calls a “scene gay, and not unpleasing” after the desert solitudes. These passages reveal Hoskins’s interest in the texture of daily life, not merely monuments.

Slave Markets and the Value of Persons

In the same bazaar, Hoskins observes separate markets for slaves—men, women, boys, girls, and eunuchs. He notes that most eunuchs come from Abyssinia, attributing this to the brutality of neighboring states, and draws a parallel to ancient Egyptian reliefs at Medenet Abou. He records specific prices: an extremely beautiful Abyssinian girl offered for 150 dollars, another not remarkable for 80. These details are presented without moral commentary, yet the juxtaposition of beauty and commodification is stark.

One exchange stands out: Hoskins tells a peasant girl buying spices that if she were a slave he would purchase her. She laughs and replies, “upon her conscience, she was no slave.” The anecdote reveals both the author’s casual assumption of ownership and the girl’s spirited assertion of freedom. The passage is a rare moment where a local voice breaks through the traveler’s narrative.

Dress, Hair, and Social Rank

Hoskins pays close attention to hairstyles as markers of marital and maternal status. In Dongolah, married women with children wear their hair in three rows of ringlets or tresses, the lowest often reaching the shoulder; other females are permitted only two rows. At Shendy, the head-dress differs: women wear their hair loosely. These observations are typical of Hoskins’s method—he notes a rule, then a variation, without speculating on meaning.

He also describes the custom of peasant girls and men bringing grain to exchange for perfumes and spices for their hair and persons, which he calls “conformable to our European idea of remote and uncivilised people.” The remark is revealing of his own cultural framework, yet the detail itself—the use of spices as hair adornment—is concrete and specific. Hoskins’s eye for such practices gives the travelogue an ethnographic texture that complements its archaeological core.

The Goldsmith’s Trade and Material Knowledge

In a shop, Hoskins encounters a shabbily dressed man squatting with rude tools on a board—the first goldsmith of Dongolah. The man cannot work European gold, but uses gold from Sennaar, which he describes as pliable and malleable like lead. When Hoskins shows his watch, the goldsmith declares it is not gold, having never seen gold so dark-colored. The anecdote illustrates a clash of material standards: the traveler’s European gold is unrecognizable to a local expert.

Hoskins also notes the use of rudely shaped pieces of iron as money from Darfour, and the prevalence of common looking-glasses and glass beads in the bazaar. These observations accumulate into a picture of a regional economy where value is locally defined, and where the traveler’s assumptions about precious metals do not hold. The goldsmith’s confident dismissal of Hoskins’s watch is a small but telling reversal of authority.

Hoskins’s narrative is best approached as a layered document: part archaeological survey, part travel diary, part ethnographic record. Readers interested in the antiquities of Meroe will find detailed descriptions of temples and pyramids, but the book’s texture comes from its bazaar scenes, its attention to dress and commerce, and its occasional, unguarded encounters. The illustrations, though not reproduced here, are integral to the work’s purpose. Treat the text as a companion to those images, and note where Hoskins’s observations are shaped by his own cultural position.

The rain kept time against the windowsill while Hoskins walked me through Meroe’s quiet ruins, his drawings catching dust in amber light. I lingered on his bazaar notes, the strange commerce of things both living and carved. Later, drifting, I found my gaze settling on another shelf, and pulled down Views of nature: or Contemplations on the sublime phenomena of creation with scientific illustrations — Edition Insights. It felt less like a departure than an echo—stone and sky, both asking the same slow question.