Lost Levant

ANOTHER EXTRAORDINARY BOOK FROM POSTCARDBOOKS How do we understand the heritage of the Levant? In the last thousand years, the centre of cultural innovation has moved steadily westwards, leaving us with too little grasp of the arguments and ideas out of which our own civilisation built itself. In 2003, armed only with a handful of clothes and a bag of books, Rupert de Borchgrave set off on a journey of ideas that took him to the much-disputed regions where the ancient world constructed the philosophical, religious, mathematical and artistic thinking that continues to shape our lives today. This is his account of that journey, his musings, and the people he met and talked to on the way - from the head of the St Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai Desert to a celebrated Syrian zither player in Aleppo. The span of the book stretches from ancient thinkers through Byzantine Christianity and the rise of Islam to the Turkish sultanate and the Armenian genocide. MAGGIE BAWDEN WRITES Lost Levant is the chronicle of a journey through the Eastern Mediterranean region in 2003, woven into an intellectual quest for universal humanism and a philosophy of liberation. Against the backdrop of the Second Iraq War, the narrator travels from London to Mount Ararat, writing up his encounters along the way in a series of vignettes which echo the tradition of ancient epics from The Odyssey to The Epic of Gilgamesh, and which frame the journey as a modern pilgrimage through lands steeped in history and cultural significance. The journey also becomes a backdrop for a set of essays in which the author visits ancient sites and ideas, applying a modern lens to topics such as theology, politics and economics.