Carsten Niebuhr

Carsten Niebuhr (1733 - 1815) is an explorer and German geographer. Wire of farmer, it was born in Lüdingsworth in Lower Saxony. Little educated, he was peasant during several years. It was however interested by mathematics, and succeeds in following courses to become Geometrician-expert. During these studies, in 1760, one of its Masters proposed to him to join the scientific team of exploration that the king Frederic V of Denmark prepared to send in Egypt, in Arabia and Syria.

To qualify itself for this work of geometrician and Geographer, he assiduously worked mathematics during the year and half which preceded the departure by forwarding, time during which he also succeeds in acquiring some knowledge in Arab. Forwarding took the sea in January 1761 and, arrived at Alexandria, went up the the Nile and went to Suez. From there, Niebuhr went to the Mont the Sinai, and in October 1762 forwarding left Suez for Djeddah, travelling then by the road until Mocca, with the Yemen. There, in May 1763, died Frederick von Haven, the philologist of forwarding, then, a little later the naturalist Pehr Forsskål. The remaining members of forwarding visited then Sanaa, but suffered so much from the climate and the lifestyle which they turned over to Mocca.

Niebhur seems to have saved its own life and to have found health by adopting the vestimentary and food practices local. De Mocca, the boat of forwarding left then for Bombay ; Georg Wilhelm Baurenfeind, the draftsman of forwarding died during the crossing, and the doctor Christian Carl Cramer shortly after. Niebuhr then became the only survivor of forwarding. There remained 14 month in Bombay, then returned to Denmark while passing by Mascate, Bushehr, Chiraz and Persépolis, visiting the ruins of Babylon and going then to Baghdad, Mosul and Alep. After a turning by Cyprus, he visited the Palestine, crossing the Monts Taurus while going to Brassa, reaching Constantinople in February 1767 and Copenhagen ten months later.

He Maria in 1773, and had during a few years a station with the Danish military administration, which enabled him to live in Copenhagen. In 1778, however, it accepted a station in the administration of the Holstein and left food in Meldorf, where it died in 1815.

Works

Niebuhr was a precise observer and attentionné ; it had the instinct of the scientist, a great moral probity, and recorded the results of its observations with a rigorous conscience and a high desire to represent reality. The precision of the copies which it made in Persépolis of the writing Cunéiforme, for example, enabled them to be at the base deciphering of this writing.

Its works have lontemps be of traditional of the geography, the ethnology and the archeology of most of the places of Arabia than it crossed.

the first volume, Beschreibung von Arabien , was published in Copenhagen in 1772, the Danish government paying the expenses of the cost of the abundant illustrations.
In 1774 and 1778, two other volumes, suivirent : Reisebeschreibung von Arabien und anderen umliegenden Ländern .
In 1837, a long time after its death, the fourth volume was published by his/her daughter.

He also undertook to publish work of his friend Forsskål, the naturalist of forwarding, under the titles Descriptiones animalium, Flora Aegyptiaco-Arabica and Icones rerum naturalium (Copenhagen, 1775-1776).

He also contributed to the review of the Deutsches Museum, writing articles relating in particular on the interior of Africa and the political condition and miltaire of the Ottoman Empire.

Translations and biographies

French and Dutch translations of its accounts were published during its life, and a translation summarized in English of the first three volumes of its works was published in Edinburgh in 1792.

His/her son Barthold published a short account of his life in 1817 in Kiel, account which was published in English in 1838.

Thorkild Hansen wrote a biographical novel of the voyage of forwarding, biography translated into French and published under the title death in Arabia by Actes Sud.

References

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