Thomas Dawes in Aleppo

Abstract Chapter 8 discusses the chaplain Thomas Dawes’s letters from Aleppo in the 1760s. It uses Dawes’s career to reflect again on the book’s central themes. The first section describes Dawes’s work on behalf of the English Hebraist Benjamin Kennicott, and his attempt to view the renowned ‘Aleppo Codex’. It then sets out a series of arguments explaining why English manuscript collecting in Aleppo had tailed off since the days of Pococke and Huntington in the 1630s and 1670s. The shift of British commercial and imperial interests to the Indian subcontinent had been mirrored by a reorientation of scholarly concerns. The chapter then describes Dawes’s meeting with the German traveller Carsten Niebuhr, and explains what had happened to the interest in antiquities since Maundrell was in Aleppo at the end of the seventeenth century. The emergence of professional, state-sponsored antiquarian travellers, such as Niebuhr, had displaced the older more ad hoc collaboration between the chaplain and scholars at home. Although individual erudite travellers would continue to pass through Aleppo, the commerce of knowledge had come to an end.