Early tourists were fascinated by ancient Egypt and went to all lengths to take home something of what remained of its fabled civilisation, including entire mummies! Indeed, eventually, there was such demand that locals started to make fake mummies in order to meet it.

Other regions and antiquities in the Arab and Ottoman world beyond the lands of Egypt also attracted the interest of 19th-century travellers on occasion. Between 1882 and 1888, the Austrian scholar Edward Glaser ventured to Southern Arabia several times to explore ancient scripts. The objects he collected while there were focused on his interests, and many are now in European museums.

Palmyra had fascinated Europeans since its initial discovery in the late 17th century. By the 19th century, many travellers who took up the challenge to reach it were eager to secure a memento from among its ruins, an activity that went unchallenged at the time. This relief was obtained by Dr James Samson, an Austrian diplomat active in the Ottoman Empire.

Religious tourists often returned with souvenirs from the spiritual and holy sites they had visited. Within the Muslim world during the Ottoman era, textile fragments like this one were prized mementos among pilgrims visiting the Holy Cities of Mecca (Makkah) and Medina (Madinah).

In the later 19th century, the traditional workshops in the suqs of the Arab and Ottoman world began to produce curios and mementos specifically aimed at the tourist market. This vase, made either in Egypt or Syria, recalls the artistic style of the Mamluks, who had ruled the region between the 13th and early 16th centuries.

The Arabic coffee pot has remained a popular souvenir from the Arab and Ottoman world to this day. A symbol of generosity and hospitality, it is an implement found most typically among the Bedouin tribes of Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Jordan and the Arabian Peninsula.

Most travellers to the East passed through Constantinople on their way to destinations farther afield. Most were keen to obtain souvenir photographs from there. Pascal Sébah opened a photographic studio in Constantinople in 1857, and such was his success that by 1873, he had opened a branch in Cairo as well.

In the 19th century, the weaving and carpet industries flourished in the Middle East. Carpets and rugs from regions of the Ottoman Empire and Iran were often brought home by travellers, and they were most coveted possessions.

Many of the traditional crafts found in the local suqs of the Middle East in the 19th century were now made specifically for foreign visitors. Delicately inlaid items of furniture – the most famous from Syria – were often taken home to serve as centrepieces in carefully arranged Orientalist “smoking rooms” or parlours.

Traditional arts and crafts attracted many foreign buyers, who often built up entire collections of them. Some of these later formed the basis for European museum collections. Moroccan ceramics, and those from Ottoman İznik, Kütahya and Çanakkale, were particularly sought after.

The colourful clothing of the peoples of the Arab and Ottoman world intrigued Western tourists. Textiles and clothing were often collected as treasured mementoes of journeys and adventure; some items had been worn as a disguise while travelling while others were specifically purchased to be worn back home to appear “exotic” or to impress family and friends.

Jerusalem’s historic as well as its religious legacy made it an important stop-over on itineraries of 19th-century European tourists. In cities like this, artists and photographers set up studios to provide visitors with commemorative vistas.

In addition to the rise in commercial photography, many tourists had also started to make use of modern cameras to take their own “snaps” to record their journey for family and friends at home. Here, the French author Gustave Flaubert is photographed while on a visit to Cairo.

In large Ottoman and North African cities, a whole range of tourism-related industries sprang up in the 19th century. Artists and photographers, too, now aimed to provide visitors with attractive genre scenes and vistas to take home with them.

The Alhambra in Granada, Spain, was undoubtedly one of the most enticing Islamic sites to be “rediscovered” by European travellers in the 19th century. Its “Moorish” architecture and ornament inspired countless travel narratives and romantic fictional stories. As a result, visitors could not resist the urge to take a piece of it home – either in the form of a souvenir or – indeed – by chipping away at the structure itself.

This early 17th-century tile is recorded as having come from the “Omar Mosque” in Jerusalem, located near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In the 19th century, it was common practice for both tourists and curio dealers – whether legal or not – to chip off pieces of buildings or architectural decoration.

“Exotic” and eroticised images of Muslim women were highly sought-after souvenirs, among male European travellers in particular. Their suggestive scenes implied that the owner had somehow gained access to the “forbidden” sensual world of a local women’s harem, while at the same time evoking a sense of the perceived savage “backwardness” of the societies from which the women came.

Both natural disasters and demolition in the wake of modernisation projects offered European travellers and early tourists the opportunity to obtain or buy salvaged fragments of evocative architectural heritage. This 16th-century tympanum was rescued from a damaged building after an earthquake and then sold to the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna.

This 19th-century mosque lamp, probably made in Palestine originally, was purchased in Aden from a Yemeni dealer by the naturalist Franz Steindachner. Many travellers collected objects that were either immediately relevant to the purpose of their trip or represented items of an exotic contemporary life and culture that fascinated them.

Paintings of popular foreign sites always sold well: sometimes travellers bought the work while abroad, but many were also purchased at home, to remind travellers of places they had been and to evoke the atmosphere they had experienced.