The Maps of Carsten Niebuhr: 200 Years After
AbstractThis is an account of the cartographic work which resulted from a Danish expedition to Arabia in the seventeen-sixties. Niebuhr was one of those early travellers who made a serious attempt to record systematically the geographical facts about the places he visited, producing both small-scale general maps of Arabia, Egypt, Syria, etc., and town plans of important cities such as Cairo and Baghdad. His work constitutes a remarkable attempt to accomplish some precise mapping in what was then a virtually unmapped part of the world.