| Johann Ludwig Burckhardt | |
|---|---|
| Born | November 24, 1784 Lausanne, Vaud |
| Died | October 15, 1817 (aged 32) Cairo, Egypt |
| Nationality | Swiss |
| Occupation | traveler, orientalist |
Johann Ludwig (also known as John Lewis, Jean Louis) Burckhardt (November 24, 1784 – October 15, 1817) was a Swiss traveller and orientalist. He wrote his letters in French and signed Louis. He is best known for rediscovering the ruins of the city of Petra in Jordan.
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Burckhardt was born in Lausanne.
After studying in Leipzig and at the University of Göttingen he visited England in the summer of 1806, carrying a letter of introduction from the naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach to Sir Joseph Banks, who, with the other members of the African Association, accepted his offer in 1809 to launch an expedition to discover the source of the River Niger. Upon acceptance Burckhardt planned to travel to the Levant in order to study Arabic, in the belief that his journey to Africa would be facilitated if he was accepted to be as a Muslim.
As preparation Burckhardt briefly studied Arabic at the University of Cambridge,[1] and prepared for his rigorous career as an explorer by wandering bareheaded in the English countryside during a heatwave, subsisting on vegetables and water, and sleeping on the bare ground.
Burckhardt left England in March 1809 for Malta, whence he proceeded, in the following autumn, to Aleppo, Syria in order to perfect his Arabic and study Islamic Law.
In order to obtain a better knowledge of oriental life he disguised himself as a Muslim, and took the name of Sheikh Ibrahim Ibn Abdallah. There is some indication that his conversion to Islam may have been sincere, although his family denies this.
After two years passed in the Levant he had thoroughly mastered Arabic, and had acquired such accurate knowledge of the Qur'an, and of the commentaries upon its religion and laws, that after a critical examination the most learned Muslims entertained no doubt of his being really what he professed to be, a learned doctor of their law.
During his residence in Syria, Burckhardt visited Palmyra, Damascus, Lebanon and made a series of other exploratory trips in the region. One of these trips, in what is now modern-day Jordan, resulted in his 'discovery' of the extensive and unique ruins of Petra which had been undiscovered for nearly a millennium. Unsatisfied with the magnitude of this discovery he was determined to carry on with his original aim to uncover the source of the River Niger. Thus he in 1812 went to Cairo with the intention of joining a caravan to Fezzan, in Libya.
Burckhardt temporarily abandoned this goal to travel up the Nile as far as Dar Mahass; and then, finding it impossible to penetrate westward, he made a journey through the Nubian desert in the character of a poor Syrian merchant, passing by Berber and Shendi to Suakin, on the Red Sea, whence he performed the pilgrimage to Mecca by way of Jidda. At Mecca he stayed three months and afterwards visited Medina.
After enduring privations and sufferings of the severest kind, he returned to Cairo in June 1815 in a state of great exhaustion; but in the spring of 1816 he travelled to Mount Sinai, whence he returned to Cairo in June, and there again made preparations for his intended journey to Fezzan. Several hindrances prevented his prosecuting this intention, and finally, in April 1817, when the long-expected caravan prepared to depart, he was seized by dysentery[2] and died on 15 October. He had from time to time carefully transmitted to England his journals and notes, and a copious series of letters, so very few details of his journeys have been lost. He bequeathed his collection of 800 volumes of oriental manuscripts to the library of Cambridge University.
Burckhardt was portrayed by Thomas Lockyer in the 2005 BBC docudrama Egypt.
His works were posthumously published by the African Association in the following order: