John Lewis Burckhardt, ‘Travels in Nubia’, (1819)

Burckhardt was a traveller and geographer, born in Switzerland in 1788. He arrived in London in 1806, where the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa sponsored him in a quest for the source of the Niger. He travelled to Egypt in 1812, and onwards to central Sudan. On his return to Cairo, Burckhardt, unable to set off for the Niger, compiled his journals into books which he sent to London for publication.

He died in 1817 of dysentery and is buried in a Muslim cemetery under the name of Ibrahim ibn Abdallah. Travels in Nubia was the first of Burckhardt books to be published, in 1819. In an article on Burckhardt published in 1973, Professor William Adams wrote of his first journey to Dongola in the Sudan, ‘I doubt if any ethnographer in history ever returned from a five-week field trip into totally unfamiliar country with a more balanced and comprehensive account’.

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