Abstract
ON March 17 occurs the bicentenary of the birth of the famous German traveller, Carsten Niebuhr, who was the only survivor of the Danish expedition sent to examine the monuments and antiquities of the Orient in 1761. Born in the village of Lüding-worth in the Duchy of Lauenberg, Niebuhr appeared destined to follow in the footsteps of his forbears, who were small landowners. On coming of age, however, he spent his small patrimony in obtaining instruction in mathematics and by 1757 was a student at Göttingen, where he was afterwards taught the new methods of determining longitude by lunar observations by Tobias Mayer himself. Niebuhr made great use of this method in his travels in the East which occupied the years 1761–1767. After his return to Europe he commenced the publication of the account of his travels, married and, being given an official post in the town of Meldorf in Holstein, settled there. He was made a Danish councillor of State, a knight of the Daneborg and in 1802 was elected an associate of l'Institut de France. Towards the end of his life he became blind and lame. He died at Meldorf on April 26, 1815. His son, Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831), was a distinguished historian and archaeologist and his grandson, Marcus von Niebuhr (1817–1860), an eminent Prussian official.
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