7/15/2021 0:00:01
Almost 40 years before Napoleon and the West invaded the region, a famous scientific expedition was launched from Europe to the region and its leader was a man named Niebuhr.
● Niebuhr was a German explorer, geographer, traveler, mathematician, and cartographer who worked in the service of the Danish state. He lived in the period between 1733 and 1815.
One of the professors suggested Niebuhr’s name to participate in a scientific trip ordered by the King of Denmark in the year 1760 AD. The goal of the trip was a scientific trip (to collect plant materials for the benefit of Europe, and to write a comprehensive scientific, social, and geographical report on the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, and Misr.).
Niebuhr agreed to the proposal and entered a course for about a year and a half in which he studied mathematics, surveying, maps, and some lessons in the Arabic language intensively to qualify for his position in the mission as a surveyor and mapmaker.
The scientific mission included a botanist, a linguist, a painter, a doctor, and an engineer.
At the beginning of the following year, 1761, the expedition set sail, arriving in Alexandria, then Cairo, then Sinai.
In 1762 AD, Niebuhr left for Suez and arrived from there to Jeddah, and from Jeddah to Mocha in Yemen. Niebuhr wrote about all the regions he visited, drew maps, and talked about the residents there. He spent a long period of time in Yemen and visited Sana’a and others.
Two of Niebuhr’s companions were infected with malaria in Yemen, which was not a disease treated in those days. Indeed, Niebuhr himself became seriously ill, but he took it upon himself and moved to India. On the ship that was carrying him and his two companions, his two companions died, so he could continue his journey to India alone, and Niebuhr adapted. With his illness, he recovered, as he says, by following the prevailing dietary habits, knowing that Niebuhr was the only member of the mission who returned safely in the end.
Niebuhr returned from India to Muscat in Oman, toured there and wrote about it, then visited Iran, from where he moved to Iraq and stayed in Baghdad for a relatively long period. In 1767 AD, Niebuhr visited Istanbul, then Palestine, and from there he sailed to Cyprus to return to Copenhagen in 1767.
Niebuhr’s name is very well known in Yemen. He was known in Yemen after the printing of part of his book (A Journey to the Arab Lands), in which he talks about his trip to Yemen, and it was printed under the name (From Copenhagen to Sana’a).
The truth is that when I used to listen in the past to people who had read Niebuhr’s book, and they were talking about what was mentioned in that book, and before I read his book…. I felt that Yemen was different from Yemen today. When Niebuhr visited Yemen, I felt that the people of Yemen were far away. They are very conscious today and they did not know a city called (Mecca), and I did not know the reason.
But there is something that caught me and made me think very seriously about studying that trip and what was included in it…..and this thing is the Yemeni geographer and scientist Al-Hassan Al-Hamdani.
Perhaps many do not know Al-Hassan Al-Hamdani. He is a scholar, historian, and geographer from Yemen. He lived in the third century AH, that is, almost 1000 years ago, and this man is known as the historian of Yemen and the island.
The truth is that from the beginning, I found in Al-Hassan Al-Hamdani a personality that aroused something strange in me… How?
He was born in a remote area near Sanaa, in an ancient time, a thousand years ago, but what is strange is that he was familiar with various sciences and wrote voraciously, and he was very adept at identifying geographical locations according to the Greek Ptolemy system, as he identified locations in Yemen in his book.
And here I was really surprised……..Where did Al-Hamdani receive all these sciences, when 200 years ago we did not have formal education and people were illiterate, let alone a thousand years ago, also how he excelled in the science of determining geographical locations, Even though he lived in a remote area, there were no schools in the past that taught such sciences. Rather, according to history, there were schools of jurisprudence and hadith.
I was also surprised by some of the information Al-Hamdani mentions in his book.
For example, he talks about information that is still present in Yemen despite the passage of 1,100 years, and it is assumed that it has become extinct in Yemen. This information does not fit with the history that was presented to us. The history that was presented to us speaks of a world in which there is no longer any connection with today in terms of its language, customs, or Its food or the names of its inhabitants, while Al-Hamdani talks about a type of bread that still exists today and has the same name…. Al-Hamdani was a man who lived in a modern period, not an ancient one.
He talks about Yemeni bread currently known in Yemen by its popular name (al-lahuh), and the mudar fruit (sugar cane), and he mentions it by the name mudar with the same current popular name.
There is also a strangeness that did not excite me, but it also irritated others, specifically the residents of my city. Al-Hamdani mentions most of the cities that still exist today, but he neglected to mention the name of my city in his book, even though he talks about an ancient city close to it, 5 km away, and they are of the same antiquity and age. almost .
These questions, and my listening to people’s conversations about Niebuhr’s journey, made me feel that Niebuhr is the only one capable of explaining the secret of the strangeness of Al-Hamdani’s personality and the secret of the strangeness of the information he included in his book.
And I went to Niebuhr…and indeed my analysis was accurate.
Al-Hamdani’s ingenuity in determining geographical locations in Yemen is nothing other than the ingenuity of Niebuhr, who took a long course to learn the geographical positioning system.
As for the reasons for the modernity of the information that Al-Hamdani talks about in his writing, they are nothing but the recent reports and information that Niebuhr recorded during his visit to Yemen in the modern era.
As for the strangeness of Al-Hamdani not mentioning the name of Medinat despite him mentioning the names of other cities and the name of the city near it, which is 5 km away from it, it is only because of Nippur, because Nippur in his journey also did not mention the name of Medinat, even though he mentioned the name of the city near it.
In fact, Al-Hamdani is nothing but a made-up character…and books and reports of Western travelers and orientalists were attributed to him, with modifications that were translated, modified, and additions were made to them and attributed to him.
This is evidenced by the fact that his book (Description of the West Island), whose name is similar to the name of Niebuhr’s book (Description of the Lands of Arabia), was printed in Lebanon, but after it was printed, it was destroyed and the manuscript was lost and disappeared. There are also no manuscripts for this man that confirm these books attributed to him by the printer.
Al-Hamdani is not a real person, only Niebuhr’s reports were translated into Arabic, amendments were made to them, and they were attributed to a fictitious character named Al-Hamdani.
note :
Did you know that… There are those who talked about a strange thing that happened upon Nippur’s arrival… Nippur arrived with boxes of plants that he had taken from the region… but the political establishment and Nippur left the boxes and made them destroyed.
So what is the goal of this trip?!
According to what some studies by foreign researchers and historians reported about Niebuhr, Niebuhr returned to Europe and had several papers containing drawings of Egyptian inscriptions and inscriptions of the region, and there was a prominent interest on Niebuhr’s part in deciphering Misr’s inscriptions and the Musnad.
So this is the famous trip, on which large sums of money were spent, and which is said to be the first European trip in which a financial grant was paid to the trip team until their death.
Niebuhr’s journey is the historical context that preceded the West’s translation of the inscriptions of the region, especially the inscriptions of Misr, which contained the true memory of its inhabitants….The West’s translation of the inscriptions of Misr and the region, and the appearance of the books of Al-Hasan Al-Hamdani and others, was not a coincidence, but emerged from a previous European-centric awareness. … His main interest was in the ancient writings of the region, a comprehensive geographical survey of the region, a social scientific report on it before the invasion and occupation of the region, and the printing of the new, fictitious historical memory of the region (Al-Hassan Al-Hamdani and others) after concealing the people’s memory of the truth recorded in the inscriptions of the ancient region.