Johann Ludwig Burckhardt

Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (throughout his life he would also call himself Jean Louis and John Lewis) (Lausanne, November 24 1784 - Cairo, October 15, 1817) was a Swiss explorer, deeply knowledgeable in the Arabic language and the Islamic religion who, posing as an Arab merchant, traveled through the Near East and Nubia. He was the European who found the ruins of Petra in 1812, the ancient capital of the Nabateans and one of the first Europeans to visit Mecca and Medina. He also discovered to the West the temples of Pharaoh Ramses II and Nefertari at Abu Simbel, Egypt. He converted to Islam, taking the name Ibrahim ibn Abdullah.

First trips

Burckhardt was born in Lausanne. After studying in Leipzig and at the University of Göttingen, he visited England in the summer of 1806 with a letter of introduction from the naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach to Sir Joseph Banks who, together with the other members of the African Association, an organization whose objective was to improve knowledge of African geography, they accepted his offer to launch an expedition aimed at discovering the source of the Niger River. Once accepted, Burckhardt planned to travel to the East in order to study Arabic, believing that his journey through Africa would be facilitated if he was accepted as a Muslim. In preparation, Burckhardt studied the Arabic language at the University of Cambridge, and prepared rigorously for his career as an explorer, for which he dedicated himself to wandering the countryside without any protection from the sun, with his head uncovered, for a heat wave, subsisting only on vegetables and water and sleeping in the open.

Burckhardt left England in March 1809 for Malta, from where he went in the autumn to Aleppo, Syria, in order to perfect his Arabic and study Islamic laws. In order to gain a better knowledge of Eastern life, he posed as a Muslim and took the name Sheikh Ibrahim Ibn Abdallah. There are indications that his conversion to Islam may have been sincere, although his family denied this. There he spent two years. In Cairo, he fell victim to dysentery, when he was finally preparing to cross Africa to the country of Niger.

Publications

He published in London: Journey to Nubia, Journey to Syria, and Journey to Arabia.

1. Travels in Nubia (1819)
2. Travels in Syria and the Holy Land (1822)
3. Travels in Arabia (1829)
4. Arabic Proverbs, or the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1830)
5. Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys (1831)
6. (in Spanish) Life and Travel of John Lewis Burckhardt. Translation: Marta Pérez. Barcelona, Editorial Laertes, 1991. ISBN 84-7584168-6
7. (in Spanish) Travel to Mount Sinai. Translation: Marta Pérez. Barcelona, Editorial Laertes, 1991. ISBN 84-7584-174-0