The word harem comes from the Arabic and refers to something forbidden or kept safe. The word originally referred to the part of a Muslim house built to ensure privacy of Muslim women. Entry was forbidden to men who were not members of the family.
The first person to refer to the harem in English was Thomas Herbert, one of the first to travel to the Middle East and write about it. Aged 21, he travelled for two years as a member of a British diplomatic mission 1627 and 1629. His main claim to fame was the travel book Some Years Travels into Africa and Asia the Great, especially describing the famous Empires of Persia which he revised and updated five times in his lifetime. The book includes an early portrait of a dodo and yes the harem as a section of Shah’s Palace reserved as a sanctuary for women. “….He has three hundred women in his seraglio (called here harem)”. Herbert, as many other writers and diplomats of the time, had the disadvantage of been a man and could not go further in his description of a harem.
This was reserved for Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a wife of British ambassador in the Ottoman Empire. She had several claims to fame. She was mother-in-law to the first Scottish Prime Minister and a major figure in the world of middle eighteenth century literature. She travelled with her husband to the Orient where she learnt from the Turks about inoculation before vaccination procedures and even has her son inoculated against smallpox. And in a 1718 letter, as a woman she is the first English writer to give a first-hand account of her impressions from going into a spectacularly decorated harem in Istanbul where she had been invited to dine with the Sultana. She went into the building – the harem – which was very luxurious, with mother of pearl, ivory, olive wood, and Japanese china.
Shortly afterwards the harem was used as the general word for the females of a Muslim family, whether it was the wives or concubines. The idea was fascinating to the Western mindset and it taken up in numerous artistic works, also opera. The Mozart opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail describes the attempt of a Western hero trying to rescue the woman he loved from a harem, while much of Verdi’s Il corsaro is set in a harem.
