The Qatari Forum for Authors held its weekly session of the “Reading Heritage with Maria” initiative to talk about the book entitled “Popular Heritage in Travel Literature” translated by Dr. Ahmad Abdel Rahim Nasr.  Ms. Maria Fernandelrio, activist on social media, turned pages of the book during the presentation of the session via the forum’s YouTube Channel and confirmed that it monitors and discusses many aspects of popular heritage in the Arab Gulf region, what the travelers saw during their trips to the Arabian Peninsula and what was written about it more than one hundred years ago.

 

She said that the books includes between its covers a map that shows many sites in the Gulf region in addition to notes and information it provides about the travel and everything that reflects the culture and heritage of the People of the Arab Gulf as well as comparison between the Gulf heritage and the other heritage found in many other civilizations.

 

She stopped and talked about the traveler Richard Burton (1821-1890) who visited the Arabian Peninsula and wrote about the most important areas in it and talked about the clothes, customs, traditions, weapons, food and drink of its inhabitants. Therefore, he wrote his diaries about this area. She said, “Richard wrote about the lives of people in the Arabian Peninsula and many details of their daily lives and how they preserved meat to be protected from high temperature. He also wrote about woman’s clothes and noted similarity in clothing with People of Egypt which he had previously visited. Moreover, he described houses that existed at that time”.