Polish Explorer's Manuscript on Arabia Helps Preserve Cultural Heritage

Researcher Filip Kucera, who has explored Rzewuski’s life and works, notes that Rzewuski disappeared, presumed dead, during a military battle in 1831, but the manuscript of Sur les chevaux survived, passing from hand to hand among relatives. In 1928 it was acquired by the National Library in Warsaw. Fire destroyed most of the library’s collections in 1944, but Rzewuski’s manuscript happened to have been moved to a workshop for rebinding, and so it survived.

Yet it remained unpublished, and few knew of Rzewuski or his work. In 2012, in cooperation with the Qatar Museums Authority, the library at last began preparing to publish Sur les chevaux in its entirety. Six years later, a scholarly five-volume edition appeared in Polish, English and French, comprising more than 1,800 pages that include extensive notes and commentaries on Rzewuski’s text as well as contextual essays. 

Cultural diplomacy followed in the Arabian Gulf, as ornate facsimile editions were presented in Doha, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and, most recently, Kuwait City in 2022, accompanied by exhibitions and public education programs to raise awareness of Rzewuski’s life and work. More than two centuries after Rzewuski returned from Arabia, his book can now be read worldwide on the Polish National Library website. 

Collaborative projects between Arab and European governments on cultural heritage preservation, such as that on the Rzewuski manuscript, are highlighting ongoing shifts over control of historical narratives and knowledge production.

“Qatar’s initiative to digitize and publish the Rzewuski manuscript fits into its larger strategy of preserving and promoting cultural heritage through partnerships with global institutions,” says Haya Al-Noaimi, a liberal arts professor at Northwestern University in Doha. “The region suffers from a dearth of indigenous [documentation], and manuscripts like this one are a necessary addition to the canon of historical knowledge.”

Al-Noaimi regards Rzewuski’s manuscript as “a valuable historical and ethnographic source” for understanding Bedouin cultural heritage and the history of the Arabian Peninsula, not least because it fills gaps in knowledge left by the lack of locally produced contemporaneous sources. “The Bedouin revere their oral heritage and take pride in it,” affirms Palestinian American scholar Seraj Assi, author of The History and Politics of the Bedouin (2018). “Written sources by Rzewuski and others offer a valuable contribution [to] documenting Bedouin history.” 

As Global South countries build postcolonial nations and redefine their geopolitical relationships, many are also reclaiming their own history. That happens metaphorically, as new perspectives emerge from critical analysis, but also literally. Most primary source material on the Middle East is held in archives in faraway capitals: London, Paris, Warsaw. Only scholars with the resources to secure access in person have been able to study it—and it is they, therefore, who have written the region’s history.

Nowadays, Qatar’s strategy forms “part of nation-building,” says Gerd Nonneman, professor of international relations at Georgetown University in Doha, citing Qatar’s 10-year collaboration with the British Library to digitize and publish colonial-era archives.

Similar efforts in nation-building and preservation of historical narratives are ongoing in neighboring countries, including Saudi Arabia. Recently, the King Abdullah Foundation for Research and Archives (Darah) released the complete works of the prominent 19^th-century scholar and genealogist Ibrahim bin Saleh bin Issa, whose writings shed light on the history and lineage of the Najd region. 

While regional scholars and writers play a central role in retrieving the history of the peninsula, Rzewuski’s manuscript is an essential asset.

Digitization and publication of sources such as Rzewuski’s manuscript facilitate broad-based challenges to previously accepted historical narratives, says Rosie Bsheer, professor of history at Harvard University. It heralds a realignment of who writes the Middle East’s history, “[affording] a crucial resource for students who seek to conduct archival research for which little or no funds are available for travel.”

Bsheer adds that such projects “not only break the financial, physical and other barriers of conducting research on the Gulf and its peoples, which have been marginalized from history. But, in reading these digital archives against the grain, it will also allow us to study the politics of knowledge production more broadly.”

Who was Rzewuski?

The facts of Rzewuski’s life are elusive, but biographers such as Kucera and others note that he was born in 1784 into a noble land-owning family in the Polish city of Lwów—now Lviv in Ukraine. After a privileged childhood in Vienna and graduation from a military academy, he served as a cavalry officer in the imperial Austrian army. Inspired by his uncle, the renowned ethnographer Jan Potocki, Rzewuski developed an interest in Arab and Turkish culture. He learned Arabic, founded the pioneering scholarly journal Fundgruben des Orients (Sources of Oriental Studies) and then, in 1817, left to spend three years living and traveling in Syria, Iraq and Arabia.

Sur les chevaux demonstrates Rzewuski’s fascination with everything equestrian. As he became more deeply integrated into the culture and society of the desert-dwelling Bedouin of Najd, in central Arabia, Rzewuski recorded in intimate detail—in words and more than 400 exquisitely precise annotated color drawings—the characteristics of the pure-bred Arabian horses that were, and still are, so highly valued in the region.

In the manuscript Rzewuski described Bedouin customs and lifestyles and compiled an extensive genealogy of tribes. He drew desert landscapes, vernacular architecture, clothing, weaponry, Arabic calligraphy and more. But Rzewuski’s most valuable, and original, contribution was in the form of musical notation, by which he recorded the songs and melodies that he heard. 

Rzewuski’s transcription is unique since Bedouin musicians generally learn and perform songs by ear alone. His 200-year-old notation recently enabled modern musicians to reconstruct and perform previously unheard Najdi Bedouin songs.

According to his writings, he was named Amir (Prince) and Taj al-Fahr (Crown of Glory, a rendering in Arabic of the literal meaning of his given name, Waclaw), among other honorifics. 

Rzewuski eventually returned to settle in Savran, a rural area of southern Ukraine. There he established one of Europe’s first Arabian stud farms and created an Islamic garden, using shade and flowing water to encourage contemplation. He dressed in Bedouin-style robes and surrounded himself with books including the Qur’an, although he seems not to have embraced Islam.

Cross-cultural influence and outcomes

Rzewuski’s motivations for his journey, and for writing in such detail afterward, remain unclear. On the one hand, his attitudes were archetypically orientalist: He went to Arabia because—as he himself wrote—“I sought free people remaining in a natural state.” “I feel at home in the desert,” he boasted later. “I ride a horse and wield a spear like a true Bedouin. Heat does not weaken me. I am unafraid of hardships and fatigue. No kind of danger scares me.”

Scholar Jan Reychman, in his 1972 study Podróżnicy polscy na Bliskim Wschodzie w XIX w [Polish Travelers in the Middle East in the 19th Century], noted: “In the Bedouin [Rzewuski] saw the dream children of nature, untainted by tyranny or greed. ... Disappointed by Europe, he turned to the East.”

Yet Ewelina Kaczmarczyk, literary researcher and editor of the cultural media site Salam Lab, points out that Rzewuski’s travels may have had a more prosaic purpose. Horse-breeding across Europe had been in decline since the Napoleonic Wars of 1803-1815. Although he clearly loved horses and was an expert rider, Rzewuski may have used them as leverage to gain aristocratic support for his journey, and then to provide himself with status and wealth on his return. 

The Arabian horses he brought back were the first in Europe: Rzewuski was a pioneer breeder and is known to have brokered the sale of purebred Arabians to royal studs from France to imperial Russia.

Whatever his motivations, Rzewuski seems to have interacted with the Bedouin as equals and been accepted by them as such. His writings “situate the Bedouins as active agents, rather than passive subjects of external empires,” al-Noaimi notes. That is especially remarkable, considering the prevailing tone of condescension or hostility colonial officials and traveler accounts took toward Bedouin people—and Arabs of any background—at the time, as many scholars suggest.

Sur les chevaux “enhances notions of national identity and heritage in the Gulf,” says al-Noaimi, adding that its fame since publication in 2018 “highlights a shift in thinking [to] embrace narratives from persons who were not necessarily involved in colonial knowledge production.”

By contrast, Kaczmarczyk suggests that Rzewuski’s newfound fame “is really about going to back to Polish roots.” She reflects that contemporary Poland “forgets about how the East influenced Polish identity, how we traded with the Arab world, how we were fascinated by Arab and Islamic cultures.

“Rzewuski’s manuscript matters for the music he transcribed, for the genealogies he recorded and for his work on horse breeding—but also because it demonstrates our connections and our common interests. It is a light in the dark atmosphere of today.”