Johann Ludwig Burckhardt

Johann Ludwig Burckhardt was born on 25 November 1784 in Lausanne, where his Basel parents were staying (the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie gives the 24th). He grew up in Basel, in the Kirschgarten house built by his father, Johann Rudolf Burckhardt, a silk ribbon manufacturer hostile to the Revolution according to the Neue Deutsche Biographie. After two years in Neuchâtel, he studied at Leipzig from 1800 to 1804, then at Göttingen. There he took natural sciences and languages, and also law and statistics according to the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland.

In 1806, he went to England with a letter from Blumenbach to Sir Joseph Banks. The African Association of London chose him to take up the work of Hornemann: to reach inner Africa by the caravan route linking Cairo to Timbuktu. In London and Cambridge, he learned Arabic, acquired some notions of medicine and hardened himself to fatigue. Leaving Malta in February 1809, he took the name Sheikh Ibrahim ibn Abdallah. He spent about a year in Aleppo perfecting his Arabic, then visited Palmyra, Damascus, Lebanon and the Hauran. In 1812, he reached Petra, whose discovery the NDB credits to him, and arrived in Cairo in September.

With no caravan heading west, he turned south. In 1813, he travelled up the Nile beyond Aswan to the borders of Dongola and in March glimpsed the great temple of Abu Simbel, almost buried under the sand: the HDS regards him as the first European to have seen it. In 1814, joining a caravan of merchants, he crossed the desert to Berber and Shendi, then reached Suakin towards the end of July and crossed the Red Sea to Jeddah. These two expeditions make up Travels in Nubia, published posthumously in London in 1819 by the African Association, with a biographical memoir at the front; a second edition followed in 1822 and a German translation as early as 1820.

Probably a convert to Islam, he was examined on doctrine before two ulemas, then visited Mecca, Mount Arafat and Medina; back in Cairo in 1815 with the title of hajji, he collected Arabic proverbs there, studied the life of the Bedouin and wrote an account of the war against the Wahhabis. A friend of Giovanni Belzoni, he pointed out Abu Simbel to him and introduced him to the British consul Henry Salt; the same year, he had the colossal head of a statue of Ramesses II sent to England. His other books also appeared after his death: Travels in Syria and the Holy Land (1822, edited by William Martin Leake), Travels in Arabia (1829), Notes on the Bedouins and Wahábys and Arabic Proverbs (1830).

Struck down by dysentery according to the NDB, by a fever according to the ADB, he died in Cairo on 15 October 1817, shortly after the arrival of the Fezzan caravan he had been waiting for. He was buried in the Muslim cemetery with the honours due to a sheikh and a hajji. He bequeathed his oriental manuscripts to the University of Cambridge, while his journals went back to the African Association. His letters to his parents, written from 1808 to 1817, were published in Basel in 1905 in the weekly Der Samstag; the Basel Historical Museum has devoted a biography to him, Scheich Ibrahim. His descriptions fed the cartographers and ethnographers of the nineteenth century.