alist Blumenbach to Sir
Joseph Banks, who, with the other members of the African Association,
accepted his offer to explore the interior of Africa. After studying in
London and Cambridge, and inuring himself to all kinds of hardships and
privations, Burckhardt left England in March 1809 for Malta, whence he
proceeded, in the following autumn, to Aleppo. In order to obtain a better
knowledge of oriental life he disguised himself as a Mussulman, and took
the name of Sheikh Ibrahim Ibn Abdallah. After two years passed in the
Levant he had thoroughly mastered Arabic, and had acquired such accurate
knowledge of the Koran, and of the commentaries upon its religion and laws,
that after a critical examination the most learned Mussulmans entertained
no doubt of his being really what he professed to be, a learned doctor of
their law. During his residence in Syria he visited Palmyra, Damascus,
Lebanon and thence journeyed via Petra to Cairo with the intention of
joining a caravan to Fezzan, and of exploring from there the sources of the
Niger. In 1812, whilst waiting for the departure of the caravan, he
travelled up the Nile as far as Dar Mahass; and then, finding it impossible
to penetrate westward, he made a journey through the Nubian desert in the
character of a poor Syrian merchant, passing by Berber and Shendi to
Suakin, on the Red Sea, whence he performed the pilgrimage to Mecca by way
of Jidda. At Mecca he stayed three months and afterwards visited Medina.
After enduring privations and sufferings of the severest kind, he returned
to Cairo in June 1815 in a state of great exhaustion; but in the spring of
1816 he travelled to Mount Sinai, whence he returned to Cairo in June, and
there again made preparations for his intended journey to Fezzan. Several
hindrances prevented his prosecuting this intention, and finally, in April
1817, when the long-expected caravan prepared to depart, he was seized with
illness and died on the 15th of October. He had from time to time carefully
transmitted to England his journals and notes, and a very copious series of
letters, so that nothing which appeared to him to be interesting in the
various journeys he made has been lost. He bequeathed his collection of 800
vols. of oriental MSS. to the library of Cambridge University.

His works were published by the African Association in the following
order:--_Travels in Nubia_ (to which is prefixed a biographical memoir)
(1819); _Travels in Syria and the