Lavishly illustrated article on an exhibition about the Egyptian protective diety Bes, which was ... more Lavishly illustrated article on an exhibition about the Egyptian protective diety Bes, which was shown in Amsterdam (Allard Pierson Museum), Copenhagen (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek), and Hannover (Museum August Kestner) 2019 through 2022.
Details of the lamentable fate of the Royal Danish expedition to Arabia were first made well-know... more Details of the lamentable fate of the Royal Danish expedition to Arabia were first made well-known to a wider audience through the book "Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition 1761-1767" published in Danish in 1962 by the Danish novelist Thorkild Hansen (1927Hansen ( -1989)), due to a fair number of translations of his first major success of many so-called documentary novels to follow. Its reader learns that six members of this expedition left Europe in 1761, traveled via Egypt and Yemen, and within the three years before it reached its furthest destination, Bombay, four expedition members had passed away from malaria with the fifth one to die at this place. Only the youngest member of the expedition and also its head, the German cartographer Carsten Niebuhr (1733-1815) was to survive and to travel by himself another three years via Persia and the Near East back to Copenhagen which he finally reached 1767. Therefore, it seems obvious when mentioning this expedition that one cannot really speak of a success story. However, this can only be said at first glance. Dealing during the last 25 years more in detail with the expedition in its historical and cultural context as well as with its scientific outcome has proven otherwise, so that just some years ago The Times of London called the expedition "One of the most extraordinary journeys of all time." To yield this new perspective was primarily built upon researching the impact publications from the expedition had and to what extend it contributed to Europe's knowledge of the Orient through writings. The newly published book under review is -and will be so for a long time to come -the first attempt to collect and research the realia which the expedition brought to Europe. These have been neglected until today due to the circumstances that it was generally a fairly well-known fact, e.g. by the above mentioned book by Thorkild Hansen, that the expedition lost most of what it gathered through destruction at the custom's house in Yemen in April 1763. So fully understandably expectations set into a "Niebuhr's collection" were very low indeed. That this was entirely wrong made the author Anne Haslund Hansen (to my knowledge not a sibling of T. Hansen) even dare to call her book "Niebuhr's
Uploads
Papers by C.E. Loeben