4 ideas
In 1761 Denmark sent six men to Arabia: philologist von Haven, naturalist Forsskål, physician Kramer, artist Baurenfeind, the servant Berggren, and surveyor Carsten Niebuhr. Within about two years of reaching Yemen, von Haven died at Mocha, Forsskål at Yerim, Baurenfeind and Berggren at sea, and Kramer in Bombay, all of disease. Niebuhr alone continued overland through Persia and Mesopotamia and reached Copenhagen in 1767.
Niebuhr attributed his survival to giving up European habits. He wore local dress, ate the plain local diet, avoided heavy European food and drink, and travelled cheaply and unobtrusively. He argued that local practice already encodes solutions to local climate and disease, and that his companions' insistence on home customs helped kill them.
At Persepolis Niebuhr copied cuneiform inscriptions he could not read, recording each sign exactly rather than interpreting it. He noticed that the inscriptions used three distinct scripts. Because his copies were faithful and uninterpreted, later scholars such as Grotefend could use them to begin deciphering Old Persian cuneiform.
The expedition was sent with a list of scholarly questions drafted in Göttingen by Michaelis, mostly about biblical philology and customs. On the ground, many questions proved unanswerable, badly framed, or irrelevant to what Arabia actually offered. Niebuhr's lasting results came from what he measured himself: astronomically fixed positions, maps of Yemen and the Red Sea, and plans of towns. The lens is that a research agenda set far from its subject gets reshaped by what fieldwork can actually reach.