Niebuhr in Egypt: European Science in a Biblical World - Softcover

Guichard Jr., Roger H.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1620325055 ISBN 13: 9781620325056

Publisher: Pickwick Publications, 2013

Synopsis

As a member of the Royal Danish Expedition to Arabia, Carsten Niebuhr is justly celebrated for his contribution to an understanding of the Arab world. But the most concentrated period of time he and the expedition spent together was not in Arabia at all. It was in Egypt. The sojourn in that country was an unexpected boon, Egypt not even appearing on the expedition's original itinerary. But what an opportunity it presented to an undertaking with an avowedly biblical purpose. When Niebuhr and his companions were detained for a year in Egypt in 1761-62, it was, after all, in a place that some have called the cradle of the Jewish people. Although Egypt had existed for millennia, with or without the Jews, the notion that its history served as little more than stage setting for the drama of mankind as played out in the Hebrew Scriptures was pervasive in eighteenth-century Europe. But freed for the year from the painstaking instructions of Professor Johann David Michaelis, the foremost biblical philologist of the eighteenth century and the expedition's prime mover, Niebuhr was able to approach the country with an open mind and in so doing made an early contribution to the nascent discipline of Egyptology.

About this title

About the Author:

Roger Guichard is a management consultant who has lived and worked for most of the last thirty years in the Arab and Muslim worlds. He is a specialist in the European exploration of Arabia.

Review:

''A number of recent books have underlined the importance of Carsten Niebuhr's travels in the Near East, but no one has brought Niebuhr, and his scholarship, to life as successfully as does Roger Guichard in this highly readable book. Guichard accomplishes this by describing in detail how Niebuhr spent his year (1761-62) in Egypt, negotiating the suspicions of many Egyptians and ignoring the almost exclusively biblical interests of his European patrons. Guichard introduces us to a man who read extensively, measured carefully, and did not hesitate to seek out local informants and assistants--and who, as a result, produced travel narratives that enormously enriched his contemporaries' knowledge of both modern and ancient Egypt. Guichard's detailed knowledge of Arabic sources, Egyptian geography, and Ottoman history make it possible for him to offer a convincing assessment of Niebuhr's perspicacity, accuracy, and antipathy toward Eurocentric prejudices.''
--Suzanne Marchand
author of German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship --Wipf and Stock Publishers

About this edition

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1620325055
• ISBN 13: 9781620325056
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 362