Niebuhr in Egypt (eBook)

European Science in a Biblical World

Roger H. Guichard Jr. (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

2013
362 Seiten
Wipf and Stock Publishers (Verlag)
978-1-7252-4784-0 (ISBN)

Infos

As a member of the Royal Danish Expedition to Arabia, Carsten Niebuhr is justly celebrated for his contribution to an understanding of the Arab world. But the most concentrated period of time he and the expedition spent together was not in Arabia at all. It was in Egypt. The sojourn in that country was an unexpected boon, Egypt not even appearing on the expedition's original itinerary. But what an opportunity it presented to an undertaking with an avowedly biblical purpose. When Niebuhr and his companions were detained for a year in Egypt in 1761-62, it was, after all, in a place that some have called the cradle of the Jewish people. Although Egypt had existed for millennia, with or without the Jews, the notion that its history served as little more than stage setting for the drama of mankind as played out in the Hebrew Scriptures was pervasive in eighteenth-century Europe. But freed for the year from the painstaking instructions of Professor Johann David Michaelis, the foremost biblical philologist of the eighteenth century and the expedition's prime mover, Niebuhr was able to approach the country with an open mind and in so doing made an early contribution to the nascent discipline of Egyptology.

Autor

Roger Guichard is a management consultant who has lived and worked for most of the last thirty years in the Arab and Muslim worlds. He is a specialist in the European exploration of Arabia.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 13.8.2013
• Verlagsort: Eugene
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik
• Schlagworte: African American Studies • Ethnic Studies • Humanities • Niebuhr in Egypt • Roger H. Guichard Jr. • Social and Cultural History • Social Science • Sociology
• ISBN-10: 1-7252-4784-4 / 1725247844
• ISBN-13: 978-1-7252-4784-0 / 9781725247840