This wood engraving was published under the title Harem eines Hauses aus der Chalifenzeit in the first volume of Georg Ebers’s two-volume publication Aegypten in Bild und Wort (Stuttgart and Leipzig: Hallberger 1879, p. 255). The illustration depicts a so-called harem scene, in which there are several women, a child, and animals, in an Egyptian house. The interior is richly decorated with ceramic tiles, murals, and a stucco and glass window with a geometric ornament in the upper right section.

This wood engraving, which was published under the title ‘Harem eines Hauses aus der Chalifenzeit’ in the first volume of the two-volume Aegypten in Bild und Wort by the German Egyptologist and novelist Georg Ebers (1837–1898) (Stuttgart and Leipzig: Hallberger 1879, p. 255) was made after a photograph of an original work by the German Orientalist painter Adolf Seel (1829–1907). Ebers’s sumptuously produced publication, with c.700 wood engravings based on photographs of original artworks by forty renowned artists of the time, played a decisive role in shaping the perception of Egypt in the European imagination in the second half of the 19th century. In his foreword, Ebers emphasized that the illustrations reproduced in the work were not only a ‘realistic’ representation of Egypt, but also incorporated subjective interpretations by the artists: ‘Unsere größten Künstler und tiefsten Kenner alles dessen, was der Orient Malerisches bietet, haben sie uns überlassen, und wir zeigen Aegypten in diesen Blättern nicht nur wie es ist und wie es sich auf der Platte des Photographen darstellt, sondern so, wie es sich in der Seele des Künstlers abspiegelt’ (Ebers, 1879, vol. 1, p. v).