1. Carsten Niebuhr, or Karsten Niebuhr, was a German mathematician, cartographer, and explorer in the service of Denmark-Norway.
16 Facts About Carsten Niebuhr
1. 2.
Carsten Niebuhr is renowned for his participation in the Danish Arabia expedition.
3.
Carsten Niebuhr was the father of the Danish-German statesman and historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr, who published an account of his father's life in 1817.
4.
Carsten Niebuhr's father Barthold Niebuhr was a successful farmer and owned his own property.
5.
Carsten Niebuhr was probably a bright student because in 1760 Johann David Michaelis recommended him as a participant in the Danish Arabia expedition, mounted by Frederick V of Denmark.
6.
Carsten Niebuhr seems to have preserved his own life and restored his health by adopting native dress and eating native food.
7.
Carsten Niebuhr stayed in Bombay for fourteen months and then returned home by way of Muscat, Bushire, Shiraz, and Persepolis.
8.
Carsten Niebuhr's transcriptions were especially useful to Georg Friedrich Grotefend, who made the first correct decipherments of Old Persian cuneiform:.
9.
Carsten Niebuhr visited the ruins of Babylon, Baghdad, Mosul, and Aleppo.
10.
Carsten Niebuhr seems to have visited the Behistun Inscription in around 1764.
11.
Carsten Niebuhr completed 28 town plans of significant historical value because of their uniqueness for that period.
12.
In 1773, Carsten Niebuhr married Christiane Sophia Blumenberg, the daughter of the crown physician, and for some years he held a post in the Danish military service, which enabled him to remain in Copenhagen.
13.
Carsten Niebuhr demonstrated that the three trilingual inscriptions found at Persepolis were in fact three distinct forms of cuneiform writing to be read from left to right.
14.
Carsten Niebuhr contributed papers on the interior of Africa, the political and military condition of the Ottoman Empire, and other subjects to a German periodical, the Deutsches Museum.
15.
French and Dutch translations of Carsten Niebuhr's narratives were published during his lifetime, and a condensed English translation of his own three volumes, prepared by Robert Heron, was published in Edinburgh in 1792, under the title "Travels through Arabia".
16.
Carsten Niebuhr had virtually no help from the academics who had conceived and shaped the expedition in Gottingen and Copenhagen.