Naqa, Sudan.
HOLROYD, ARTHUR TODD (1806-1887), physician, explorer and jurist, was born on December 1, 1806 in London, the youngest child of Stephen Todd Holroyd, merchant, and his wife Elizabeth, née Lofthouse. Educated at private schools and Ripon Grammar School, Holroyd studied medicine in Winchester at 18, the Webb Street School of Anatomy, Southwark, the University of Edinburgh (M.D., 1830) and Christ’s College, Cambridge (M.B., 1832). Prominent in medical associations, he had become a fellow of the Zoological Society of London in 1826 and of the Linnean Society in 1829. In 1830 he married Sophia Rachel Abbs of Durham. He practised as a physician in London but, dissatisfied with his prospects, entered Lincoln’s Inn in 1835. He studied Italian in Rome and in Egypt explored above the second cataract, and became the first European to cross the Bayuda desert to Khartoum and the first Englishman to visit Kordofan. His disclosures of horrifying slave hunts led to their abolition by Mahommed Ali Pasha. Familiar with Arabic he travelled through Sinai, Palestine and Syria. In 1839 in London he read a paper on his Kordofan expedition and was elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. In May 1841 he was called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn and practised on the northern circuit. A director of the Commercial Bank of London, he was interested in the New Zealand banking system and in 1843 migrated there. In Wellington he practised as a barrister and solicitor, and moved to Sydney in 1844 after the Kororareka affair.
He was also known for the graffiti he carved into certain pyramids and temples throughout Nubia, as discovered by Happypoppeye in December 2007. Let’s see you learn that in school …chicaaaa-waaaa. I knew that name looked familiar, and that a picture would come in handy one day. “Holroyd” in the upper left, bullet marks in the upper right. UPenn professors think it’s real, mainly because of the font type used, which was in most prominent use around the mid 1800’s. Looks like he started a trend here too, in the middle of nowhere. I’m going to have to look up H. Schliephack.
…no time like the present: H is for Horst. A german who did excavations at Meroe around 1913. Hmmm, looky here, it looks like he was commander, the first of, well, here is the quote: “being of The French colonies of Senegal and the French Sudan … the Legion was first commanded by Lieutenant Horst Schliephack”. Looks like he was a military man, a photgrapher, an artist, and an explorer. …gonna have to look into this one a bit more.
Wandering the World 