Carsten Niebuhr

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Carsten Niebuhr , after a copper engraving by Carl Christian Glassbach (1751 – ca. 1793), after 1770; here as a book illustration, 1868

Carsten Niebuhr (born March 17, 1733 in Lüdingworth ; † April 26, 1815 in Meldorf ) was a German mathematician , cartographer and explorer in the Danish service.

Life

Göttingen memorial plaque for Carsten Niebuhr

Carsten Niebuhr came from a wealthy, long-established farming family in the Hadeln region . After the death of his father in 1749 he left the Latin school in Altenbruch . In 1755 he moved to Hamburg, where he completed his education at the Johanneum School of Academics . After studying mathematics for three years at the Georg-August University in Göttingen , Niebuhr joined the Danish service as a lieutenant engineer in 1760. In the same year he was elected a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences . In 1761 he was appointed by King Frederik V of Denmark as a cartographer in the six-person Danish expedition to Arabia, which began in the same year as an Arab journey with the ship passage from Copenhagen to Constantinople .

Arab trip

Even if the order for the research trip was made by the Danish king and he took over the financing, the initiative came from an appeal by the Göttingen orientalist Johann David Michaelis as early as 1753 . Michaelis hoped that the trip to the Near East would provide evidence of the truth of the biblical stories. In 1756 he repeated his request in a letter to the German governor in Copenhagen, Johann Hartwig Ernst von Bernstorff . This in turn won the Danish king over to the plan.

In addition to C. Niebuhr, the following people took part in the expedition:

  1. Professor Friedrich Christian von Haven as a philologist and expert on the Arabic language;
  2. Professor Peter Forsskål as a naturalist;
  3. Doctor Christian Carl Cramer as a doctor;
  4. Georg Wilhelm Bauernfeind as an engraver and painter;
  5. Berggren, a Swedish dragoons as servant - this is often overlooked, so that usually only a five-person expedition is spoken of. Niebuhr himself only spoke of a five-person tour company.
Niebuhr bust (by Manfred Sihle-Wissel ) in front of the Niebuhr house in Meldorf.

After a detour to the Sinai peninsula , the journey was continued in Suez on a pilgrim ship to Jeddah and Mecca in what is now Saudi Arabia . In order to avoid conflicts with the locals, Niebuhr put on national costume for his further trip. He made the first reliable map sketch of the Red Sea . This card was the decisive factor in the British Post's decision to send mail to India via Suez instead of around Africa, as was previously the case. Finally, Niebuhr reached Yemen , of which he made the first precise map on numerous trips, which would remain a standard work for the next 200 years.

Cuneiform representation with unicorn and lion (illustration from: travel description to Arabia and other surrounding countries , Amsterdam 1779)

After von Haven (May 25, 1763) and Forsskål (July 11, 1763) fell ill and died of malaria , which at the time was not diagnosable (and certainly not treatable) , the remaining four expedition members left after visiting the Yemeni capital Sanaa in 1763 Mocha (Al Mukha) to Bombay in India. Bauernfeind and Berggren also died on the sea voyage (August 29 and 30, 1763), so that only two of the expedition members reached Bombay. It was there that Cramer, Niebuhr's last companion, died of malaria on February 10, 1764.

Despite all adversities, Niebuhr continued his journey towards the sea ​​from Oman and the Persian Gulf and finally landed in Bushehr at the beginning of 1765 . From there he joined a caravan to Shiraz , where he stayed for a few weeks. He then traveled to Persepolis and copied several cuneiform inscriptions in the ruins so carefully that his notes served as a template for deciphering cuneiform scripts even decades later . So used Georg Friedrich Grotefend one of Niebuhr's copies from the Darius palace in Persepolis for his reading of the Old Persian version, the first successful Entzifferungsversuch of cuneiform. In 1766 Niebuhr made a floor plan for the city of Orfa (Urfa), today Sanliurfa .

return

Bronze statue in Lüdingworth by Frijo Müller-Belecke

In 1767 Carsten Niebuhr returned to Copenhagen by land via Iraq , Turkey and the Balkans and published the collected data and documents of the expedition. He received numerous awards for his services and work. The Göttingen professor Michaelis , however, was not one of the well-wishers. Michaelis showed practically no interest in the groundbreaking empirical knowledge of a world that was largely foreign to Europeans at the time, as he could not use them with his original intention of a collection of facts to underpin the biblical history of salvation.

Walther Witting (1864–1940): Carsten Niebuhr . Oil on canvas, signed and dated "1908"

In 1768 Niebuhr became an engineer-captain , in 1778 a real councilor and land clerk in Meldorf , and in 1808 a budget councilor . In Meldorf he was friends with the poet Heinrich Christian Boie .

In Copenhagen in 1773 he married Christiane Sophie Blumenberg (1742–1807), the daughter of the royal personal physician Henning Georg Blumenberg (1699–1745) from Goslar. Barthold Georg Niebuhr was her son, Marcus von Niebuhr her grandson.

He died in Meldorf in 1815. Niebuhr was buried in the Meldorfer Dom , where his grave slab has been preserved. There are monuments in his home town of Lüdingworth and in front of the Meldorfer Dom.

Act

In his time, Niebuhr was considered an enlightener who cast an unbiased view of the Orient. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe asked Niebuhr's son to give his father an autograph . Friedrich Schiller read Niebuhr's travelogue in 1798 - especially about his special attention to archaeological remains - at the time of Napoleon's Egyptian campaign.

Niebuhr was the first to use the method of lunar distances on the mainland to determine geographic longitude. With it he achieved excellent results for the northern Red Sea. With the help of his map, in 1772, Captain Holford dared to look for the sea route from Calcutta to Suez.

In Copenhagen, Niebuhr came into friendly contact with the young German-Dane Friedrich Münter , whom he knew how to inspire for archeology and who would later become a well-known orientalist, archaeologist and bishop in the Danish service.

The largest Scandinavian university institute in the Middle East research area, based at the University of Copenhagen, is named after Carsten Niebuhr. His measuring instruments are located together with a model of the research vessel Greenland in the Dithmarscher State Museum in Meldorf. Parts of his handwritten travelogues are in the Göttingen University Library .

Works

literature

  • Carsten Erich Carstens :  Niebuhr, Carsten . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 23, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1886, p. 661 f.
  • Julia Chatzipanagioti: A journey into the present of the past. Carsten Niebuhr's expedition to Arabia (1761–1767) . In: Transactions of the Ninth International Congress on the Enlightenment . 3 Vols. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1997. Vol. 2, pp. 863-866.
  • Jürgen Christiansen: Niebuhrslust . In: TOP 37 (19th year, June 2009)
  • Stephan Conermann, Josef Wiesehöfer (ed.): Carsten Niebuhr and his time . Contributions to an interdisciplinary symposium from 7. – 10. October 1999 in Eutin. ( Oriens et Occidens 5). Steiner, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-515-08073-2
  • Reimer Hansen :  Niebuhr, Carsten. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 19, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-428-00200-8 , pp. 217-219 ( digitized version ).
  • Thorkild Hansen: Journey to Arabia , Hoffmann and Campe, 1965
  • Anne Haslund Hansen: Niebuhr's Museum. Artefacts and Souvenirs from the Royal Danish Expedition to Arabia 1761-1767. Forlaget Vandkunsten, Copenhagen 2016
  • Volker Heenes: Carsten Niebuhr and his journey to Arabia from 1761 to 1767. In: Journeys in the Orient from the 13th to the 19th century. ( Writings of the Winckelmann Society 26). Stendal 2007, pp. 49-57, ISBN 3-910060-75-7
  • Eckardt Opitz : Carsten Niebuhr in: They are our treasure and wealth. 60 portraits from Schleswig-Holstein . Christians, Hamburg 1990, pp. 77-85 ISBN 3-7672-1115-7 .
  • Claudia Opitz-Belakhal : The "arabophile" Carsten Niebuhr. About emotional and other border crossings in "happy Arabia" . In: zeitblicke . tape 11 , no. 1 , 2012 ( online [accessed September 12, 2013]).
  • Roger H. Guichard Jr .: Niebuhr in Egypt. European Science in a Biblical World . Cambridge Lutterworth 2014. ISBN 978-0-7188-9335-4 .
  • Han F. Vermeulen : Anthropology and the Orient. C. Niebuhr and the Danish-German Arabia Expedition. In: Han F. Vermeulen: Before Boas. The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment. Lincoln & London, University of Nebraska Press 2016. ISBN 978-0-8032-5542-5 .

Web links

Commons : Carsten Niebuhr  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Carsten Niebuhr  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 178.
  2. ↑ a b Carsten Erich Carstens :  Niebuhr, Carsten . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 23, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1886, p. 661 f.
  3. ↑ Travel description follows Niebuhr's own account
  4. ^ Project "Carsten Niebuhr (1733–1815) ; 2015
  5. ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung: How do the Yemenis tie their stockings? Retrieved June 12, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Niebuhr, Carsten
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Danish mathematician, cartographer and explorer
DATE OF BIRTH March 17, 1733
PLACE OF BIRTH Ludingworth , Land Hadeln
DATE OF DEATH April 26, 1815
Place of death Meldorf