Niebuhr’s Museum. Artefacts and Souvenirs from the Royal Danish Expedition to Arabia 1761–1767

Abstract

To open with the observation that Karsten Niebuhr (1733–1815) never actually owned a museum is not to undermine in the least the wonderful volume produced by Anne Haslund Hansen, for she presents us here in remarkable detail with material that Niebuhr assembled but never possessed and which hitherto has never been brought together as a related group. The context in which this virtual collection took shape was provided by the ambitious expedition mounted in the 1760s at the behest of King Frederik V of Denmark (an enterprise that deserves to feature much more prominently than it generally does in the history of scientific exploration). The original publication of this volume as Souvenirs og sjældenheder fra Den Arabiske Rejse (also in 2016) would have left the non-Danish speakers among us little more enlightened, so its translation into English here by Dan A. Marmorstein is a real boon to English-language scholarship. It was in January 1761 that the expedition in question set out and November 1767 when it ended. The rate of attrition among the personnel proved punishingly high, for only Niebuhr would make it back to Europe, the other members – a philologist, naturalist, physician and engraver – all succumbing to illness and disease along the way. Not the least remarkable feature of the enterprise was the degree of effort invested in its planning, resulting in a list of Kongelige Instruks – Royal Instructions – and a set of 100 questions the expedition was to attempt to answer; both were published in 1762 as Fragen an eine Gesellschaft Gelehrter Männer, a text revealing the powerful influence of Linnaeus’s recent Instructio Peregrinatoris of 1759. The final instructions comprised forty-three paragraphs of detailed notes covering the organization of the expedition, its itinerary, and the responsibilities of the individual members in fields covering biblical history, geography, and natural history: ‘useful oriental manuscripts, natural specimens and other curiosities’ were to be sought out, but scholarly interest was to take priority over matters of aesthetics or prestige.