When did tourist guiding begin?

Today, we have a fairly precise answer to what a Tourist Guide is.

According to the internationally recognised definition in ISO 18513:2003 and EN 13809:2003, adopted by the World Federation of Tourist Guide Associations (WFTGA) in 2003, a Tourist Guide is:

“A person who guides visitors in the language of their choice and interprets the cultural and natural heritage of an area — normally holding an area-specific qualification issued and/or recognised by the appropriate authority.”

It is a definition that establishes tourist guiding as a qualified profession based not simply on accompanying people from one place to another, but on interpreting the heritage of a particular area.

But the definition also raises an entertaining question: what if we look backwards?

Long before professional qualifications, guiding associations, training standards — or indeed tourism itself — people were already leading groups through unfamiliar territories, interpreting places, solving logistical disasters and trying desperately to keep everybody together.

So, with apologies in advance to EN 13809, let us temporarily stretch the definition of “tourist guide”.

Quite considerably.

Because the history of guiding may have some remarkably ancient predecessors.

Noah: the first adventure tour leader?

Our highly unofficial history of guiding might begin with Noah.

His qualifications were certainly unusual. He organised transportation, managed an exceptionally diverse group of travellers, survived catastrophic weather conditions and eventually delivered his passengers safely to a new destination.

The itinerary was somewhat vague, the departure was rather dramatic, and the weather forecast was terrible. On the positive side, accommodation and meals were included.

Whether Noah provided interpretation along the way is not recorded.

Nor do we know whether any of his passengers complained about the itinerary.

Considering the circumstances, this alone may qualify the journey as one of the greatest achievements in group management in history.

Moses: when the tour runs slightly over schedule

Then comes Moses, whose experience may sound considerably more familiar to working guides.

He led a very large group towards a promised destination. The journey involved border crossings, unexpected route changes, food and water problems, difficult terrain, repeated complaints from participants and occasional disagreements concerning leadership.

Estimated duration: considerably shorter than forty years.

Actual duration: forty years.

Every guide who has ever heard the question “How much longer until we get there?” may feel a certain professional sympathy.

Moses also had to deal with perhaps the ultimate nightmare of group management: while he briefly left his group unattended to go up Mount Sinai, he returned to discover that they had constructed a golden calf.

Suddenly the tourist who disappears for fifteen minutes because he has found a souvenir shop does not seem quite so bad.

Of course, neither Noah nor Moses was a tourist guide. But their stories remind us that some elements of guiding — leadership, navigation, mediation, responsibility and, above all, managing groups of human beings — are considerably older than tourism itself.

And when we leave the world of biblical humour behind, the history becomes surprisingly real.

The ancient world already had tourists — and guides

People travelled for curiosity long before anyone invented package holidays.

Greeks and Romans travelled to religious sanctuaries, festivals, famous cities, healing centres, natural wonders and monuments. Wealthy Romans visited Greece and Egypt partly for the same reason people travel today: they wanted to see places they had heard about.

And where there were travellers staring at monuments and wondering what exactly they were looking at, there were people ready to explain them.

Ancient sources mention local interpreters and knowledgeable people who explained traditions, monuments and sacred places to visitors. Herodotus, travelling through Egypt in the fifth century BC, repeatedly relied on information supplied by Egyptian priests and local informants.

In other words, one of the oldest principles in tourism was already present:

The visitor sees something. The guide tells them what it means.

Technology has changed considerably since then. The principle has not.

Pausanias: the guide who still works after almost 1,900 years

One of the most extraordinary figures in the history of travel is Pausanias, a Greek traveller and writer of the second century AD.

His Description of Greece takes the reader through cities, sanctuaries, monuments, works of art, myths and local traditions. It is the only surviving work of its kind from antiquity to have come down to us in its entirety and today remains an invaluable source for historians and archaeologists.

Calling Pausanias a “tourist guide” would again be historically imprecise. He was a traveller and writer — essentially the creator of an extraordinary ancient guidebook.

But to a modern tourist guide reading him, something feels remarkably familiar.

He does not merely say that a temple exists. He tells stories connected with it. He discusses what deserves attention. He records local traditions. He decides what the traveller should notice and sometimes what is not worth discussing.

Almost two millennia later, archaeologists still use his descriptions when trying to understand ancient Greek sites.

Most guides would probably consider that a fairly respectable record for the longevity of their interpretation.

Then came the ciceroni

By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European travel had developed into something much closer to cultural tourism as we know it.

Young aristocrats and wealthy travellers undertook the famous Grand Tour, travelling particularly through France and Italy as part of their education.

And in cities such as Rome, they needed guides.

These knowledgeable local experts became known as ciceroni, a name associated with Cicero and suggesting learning and eloquence.

A good cicerone was much more than someone who knew where the Colosseum was.

He needed knowledge of archaeology, history and art. He needed social connections. He might arrange access to private collections, introduce travellers to artists, recommend purchases, interpret languages and explain the complicated cultural world into which the foreign visitor had arrived.

In 1644, the English traveller John Evelyn described people in Rome who earned their living by taking strangers around the city to see its sights.

The professional tourist guide was beginning to look distinctly recognisable.

James Byres: the celebrity guide of eighteenth-century Rome

And eventually history gives us individual guides whose careers would not look entirely strange today.

One of the most fascinating was James Byres, a Scottish architect and antiquarian who settled in Rome in 1758.

Byres became one of the most sought-after ciceroni for wealthy English-speaking visitors on the Grand Tour.

His “tours” were not exactly two-hour city walks.

He gathered groups, often around six to twelve people, and conducted courses lasting five or six weeks. The programme could change according to the weather: outdoor antiquities on fine days, museums when the weather was poor, churches and galleries when conditions made other visits inconvenient.

In other words, the eighteenth-century professional guide had already discovered something every modern guide knows well:

A good guide follows the programme, but knows how to adapt it to reality.

Flexibility, it seems, has been part of the profession for centuries.

Byres was also extremely well paid. His fee could be several times that charged by other guides.

Why?

Because visitors were not paying simply for information.

They were paying for his knowledge, judgement, connections, personality and ability to give them access to a world they could not experience in the same way alone.

Two and a half centuries later, the best explanation of the value of a professional guide may not have changed very much.

Guides, dragomans and the travellers heading East

As European travel expanded during the nineteenth century, another important figure became increasingly visible: the dragoman.

Part interpreter, part guide, part negotiator and sometimes part fixer, dragomans were indispensable to many travellers through the Ottoman Empire and the eastern Mediterranean.

Travel publications advised visitors arriving in Constantinople to employ a local guide, cicerone, valet-de-place or dragoman.

These people did considerably more than point at monuments. They crossed linguistic and cultural boundaries. They negotiated practical arrangements, communicated with local communities and helped travellers understand unfamiliar customs.

By the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman authorities themselves had begun formally regulating guiding and interpreting. In 1890, regulations concerning interpreters and guides for travellers introduced certification requirements for those practising the profession. Further regulations followed in the early twentieth century.

Guiding was no longer simply something that knowledgeable locals happened to do.

It was becoming a recognised and regulated profession.

And then Thomas Cook brought the groups

If the ciceroni sound familiar, the nineteenth century becomes even more so.

Thomas Cook began organising excursions in Britain in 1841. What started with railway day trips gradually developed into international escorted travel.

Soon travellers could join organised journeys through Europe and farther afield without personally arranging every train, hotel and connection.

For guides and tour leaders, one crucial development had arrived:

the group.

The group with a timetable.

The group with luggage.

The group in which somebody is always missing.

The group in which one person wants coffee precisely when everybody else is ready to leave.

The group that asks whether the restaurant is “far” when it is approximately 300 metres away.

Modern tourism had arrived.

So who was the first tourist guide?

The disappointing answer is that we probably cannot name one.

The profession did not begin on a particular morning when someone stood in front of a monument, raised an umbrella and announced:

“Good morning everyone, my name is…”

Guiding evolved because travellers have always needed other human beings.

They needed pathfinders when roads were uncertain.

They needed interpreters when languages were different.

They needed local experts when traditions were unfamiliar.

They needed scholars to explain monuments.

They needed intermediaries to enter societies they did not understand.

And eventually all of these roles began to merge into the profession we now call tourist guiding.

In his influential 1985 study of the tourist guide, sociologist Erik Cohen traced two important ancestors of the modern guide: the pathfinder, who leads people through unfamiliar territory, and the mentor, who helps them understand what they encounter.

That distinction may be thousands of years old, but it still describes our profession remarkably well.

Today GPS can perform much of the pathfinding.

A smartphone can translate a sentence.

An app can identify a monument.

Artificial intelligence can produce dates, biographies and historical summaries within seconds.

And yet travellers continue to hire guides.

Perhaps that is because the oldest function of the guide was never simply to provide information.

From the priests who explained Egypt to ancient visitors, through the ciceroni of Rome and the dragomans of Constantinople, to the professional guides working around the world today, the guide has always stood somewhere between a place and the stranger who has come to understand it.

Our tools have changed.

Our travellers have changed.

Thankfully, most of our journeys no longer last forty years.

But the essential task remains surprisingly familiar:

Know where you are going. Know the story. Look after your people. And whatever happens, try not to lose anyone on the way.