Background
Vámbéry was born as Hermann Bamberger or Ármin Bamberger in Svätý Jur, Slovakia (former Hungary, Austrian Empire), into a poor Slowak Jew family.
(His Life and A dventures. Written by Himself. With Portra...)
His Life and A dventures. Written by Himself. With Portrait and 14 I llustrations, Square Imperial i6mo, cloth extra, 6s. A most fascinating work, full of interesting and curious experiences. Contemporary Review. It is partly an autobiographic sketch of character, partly an account of a singularly daring and successful adventure in the exploration of a practically unknown country. In both aspects it deserves to be spoken of as a work of great interest and of considerable merit. Saturday Review. We can follow M. Vambery sfootsteps in Asia with pride and pleasure ;we welcome every word he has to tell us about the ethnography and the languages of the East. A cademy. The character and temperament of the writer come out well in his quaint and vigorous style. .. .T he expressions, too, in English, of modes of thought and reflections cast in a different mould from our own gives additional piquancy to the composition, and, indeed, almost seems to bring out unexpected capacities in the language. A tliemzuin. Has all the fascination of a lively romance. It is the confession of an uncommon man ;an intensely clever, extraordinarily energetic egotist, wellinformed, persuaded that he is in the right and impatient of contradiction. Daily Telegraph. The work is written in a most captivating manner, and illustrates the qualities that should be possessed by the explorer. Nwoe Vremya, Moscow. We are glad to see a popular edition of a book, which, however it be regarded, must be pronounced unique. The writer, the adventures, and the style are all extraordinary the last not the least of the three. It is flowing and natural a far better style than is written by the majority of English travellers. St. James s Gazette. %O ver Eighty other English and Foreign periodicals have reviewed this work. LONDON :T. FISHER UNWIN, 26, PATERNOSTER SQUARE. (Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.) About the Publisher
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(History of Bokhara - From the Earliest Period down to the...)
History of Bokhara - From the Earliest Period down to the Present is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1873. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres.As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature.Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has become rare and historical knowledge for the future.
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(Originally published in 1886. This volume from the Cornel...)
Originally published in 1886. This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies. All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume.
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(Hungary in Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern Times is an unch...)
Hungary in Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern Times is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1890. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has become rare and historical knowledge for the future.
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Vámbéry was born as Hermann Bamberger or Ármin Bamberger in Svätý Jur, Slovakia (former Hungary, Austrian Empire), into a poor Slowak Jew family.
According to Ernst Pawel, a biographer of Theodor Herzl, as well as Tom Reiss, a biographer of Kurban Said, Vámbéry's original last name was Wamberger rather than Bamberger. He was raised Jewish, but later became an atheist. Vámbéry was 1 year old when his father died and the family moved to Dunaszerdahely (now Dunajská Streda in Slovakia). He attended the local school until the age of 12 and showed a remarkable aptitude for learning languages. He was forced to walk with crutches because of a congenital disorder and eventually had to leave school due to difficult financial circumstances. He worked briefly as a tailor's assistant, but after becoming tutor to the son of the village innkeeper, he was enabled by his friends to enter the "Untergymnasium" of Szentgyörgy.
By the age of sixteen, he had a good knowledge of Hungarian, Latin, French, and German. He was also rapidly acquiring English, the Scandinavian languages, Russian, Serbian, and naturally other Slavic languages.
In 1846, he went to Pressburg (today Bratislava, Hungarian: Pozsony), where he remained three years. Later he studied at Vienna, Kecskemét, and Budapest.
Vámbéry was especially attracted by the literature and culture of the Ottoman Empire including Turkey. By the age of twenty, Vámbéry had learned enough Ottoman Turkish to enable him to go, through the assistance of Baron Joseph Eötvös, to Istanbul and establish himself as a private tutor of European languages. He became a tutor in the house of Huseyin Daim Pasha, and, under the influence of his friend and instructor, Ahmet Efendi, became a full Osmanli, serving as secretary to Fuat Pasha. About this time he was elected a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in recognition of his translations of Ottoman historians.
After spending about a year in Constantinople, he published a German-Turkish dictionary in 1858. Later, he also published various other linguistic works. He also learned some twenty other Turkish languages and dialects. Returning to Budapest in 1861, he received a stipend of a thousand florins from the academy, and in the autumn of the same year, disguised as a Sunni dervish, and under the name of Reshit Efendi, he set out from Constantinople. His route lay from Trebizond on the Black Sea to Tehran in Persia, where he joined a band of pilgrims returning from Mecca, spending several months with them traveling across Central Iran (Tabriz, Zanjan, and Kazvin). He then went to Shiraz, through Ispahan, and in June, 1863, he reached Khorezm (Central Asia). Throughout this time, he succeeded in maintaining his disguise as "Reshit Efendi," so that upon his arrival at the Khanate of Khiva he managed to keep up appearances during interviews with Khan Sayyid Muhammad. Together with his band of travelers, he then crossed Bokhara and arrived at Samarkand. Initially, he aroused the suspicions of the local ruler, who kept him in an audience for a full half-hour. Vámbéry managed to maintain his pretences, and left the audience laden with gifts. Upon leaving Samarkand, Vámbéry began making his way back to Constantinople, traveling by way of Herat. There he took leave of the band of dervishes and joined a caravan to Tehran, and from there, via Trebizond and Erzurum, to Constantinople, arriving there in March 1864.
This was the first successful journey of its kind undertaken by a European; and since it was necessary to avoid suspicion, Vámbéry could not take even fragmentary notes, except by stealth. After a long and perilous journey he arrived back at Pest in May 1864. He went to London to arrange the English language publication of his book about the travels. "Travels in Central Asia" and its Hungarian counterpart "Közép-ázsiai utazás" were published in 1865. Thanks to his travels Vámbéry became an internationally renowned writer and celebrity. He became acquainted with members of British social elite. The Ambassador of Austria in London gave him a letter of recommendation to the Emperor, who received him in an audience and rewarded Vámbéry's international success by granting him professorship in the Royal University of Pest.
Vámbéry was one of the Jewish Orientalists, like Kurban Said (who was possibly Lev Nussimbaum), who assumed Muslim identities and wrote about Muslim life. He converted four times. He was a double agent and a double dealer. He was close to the Ottoman sultans. In 1900-1901 he promised Theodor Herzl to arrange an audience for him with Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamit II, but his real goal was to obtain money from Herzl, and he did not arrange the meeting.[citation needed] The Ottomans were merely using Herzl as a playing card in their negotiations with Maurice Rouvier of France on the consolidation of their debt.
Vámbéry became known also as a publicist, zealously defending English policy in the East as against that of the Russians. He was widely celebrated at his 70th birthday in March 1902, receiving greetings from academic institutions all over Europe. The British King Edward VII appointed him an Honorary Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, his house order, followed by a letter where Vámbéry was appreciated as "so good and constant a friend to England". In 2005 the National Archives at Kew, Surrey, made files accessible to the public, and it was revealed that Vámbéry had been employed by the British Foreign Office as an agent and spy whose task it was to combat Russian attempts at gaining ground in Central Asia and threatening the British position on the Indian sub-continent.
He advocated the theory of close Turkic-Hungarian linguistic and ethnic relationship, and his publications on the subject provoked a harsh scientific and public debate in Hungary, remembered as the "Ugric-Turk War". Vámbéry argued that the large number of similarities between Turkic languages and Hungarian pointed to a shared origin of these languages and peoples in Northern Asia. His strongest evidences were the large corpus of ancient Turkish words in Hungarian word-stock (300-400 for a minimum, and even more with good alternative Turkic etymologies), and the strong typological similarity of Hungarian and Turkic languages. In his opinion Hungarian is a contact language, more precisely a mixed language, and a fruit of the intermingling of early Hungarians with Turkic peoples; as a result of this merger, the Hungarian language got a unique, distinctly dual (Ugric AND Turkic) character. (The intriguing problem of Turkic-Hungarian language relations is far from settled even after centuries of research.) Vámbéry was not the first to suggest such mixed origin; the German linguist and Orientalist Wilhelm Schott (1802-1889) was a proponent of Finn-Turk-Hungarian kinship, and considered the Hungarians (and their language) a mixture of Turkic and Hyperborean / i.e. Saami, Samoyed etc. / elements. Nonetheless, Vámbéry's theory was opposed by proponents of the Finno-Ugric theory of the origins of Hungarian, who gradually triumphed in Hungary but not in Turkey. In Turkey, Hungarian and Turkish are still considered as two branches of the same language family, the Ural–Altaic.
Vámbéry was acquainted with Bram Stoker, during a stay in London, and Stoker claimed him as his consultant, and inspirator of main antagonist character Dracula and, of course, the book's title. The character of Professor Van Helsing in Stoker's novel, Dracula, is sometimes said to be based on Vámbéry, though Stoker was likely inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu's Dr. Hesselius. In the novel (chapters 18 and 23) Van Helsing refers to his "friend Arminius, of Buda-Pesth University".
There is a vampire hunter character in the webcomic Sluggy Freelance named Arminius Vambrey possibly based on this Armin Vambery and his candidacy as inspiration for Abraham Van Helsing.[citation needed]
His son, Rusztem Vambery, briefly served as Hungary's ambassador to the United States after World War II.
(History of Bokhara - From the Earliest Period down to the...)
(Hungary in Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern Times is an unch...)
(Originally published in 1886. This volume from the Cornel...)
(His Life and A dventures. Written by Himself. With Portra...)