A Brill Calendar: October 15

The Death of Dr. Burckhardt

Few areas of general interest were created so abruptly and unexpectedly as a fascination for ancient Egypt.

This resulted from Napoleon’s doomed military campaign amidst the Pyramids at the very end of the 18th century. All of a sudden, everything possibly connected with ancient civilization in mysterious parts of the Mediterranean became a fashionable rage, world-wide.

Scholarship and learning were, quite naturally, included in this general enthusiasm. It makes Egyptology a relatively young branch of intellectual inquiry. And it is seldom that an almost complete blank in Western awareness of the past was so romantically filled in. One of the pioneers during the first decades of these breathtaking discoveries in this new, yet old world was Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, a Swiss scholar, since 1809 working under auspices of the British Association for Promoting the Discovery of Africa’s Interior.

After learning Arabic in Syria, and calling himself in the Muslim world 'Ibrahim Ibn Abd Allah', he was the first European to ‘discover’ the city of Petra in 1812; less than two centuries later an centre of mass-tourism, - a non-existent phenomenon in Burckhardt’s day. A little later he was the first Westerner to set eyes on the unknown temple of Abu Simbel. He died October 15 1817 in Cairo, still waiting to make his way through the Sahara; but not after he had pioneered a visit to Mecca. His main writings appeared only posthumously in print; he left his vast collection of Arabic manuscripts to his Alma Mater in Cambridge. In the then brand-new Kingdom of the Netherlands, Leyden University was the first to recognize whole-heartedly the academic potential and value of this new awareness.