Genus Niebuhria

For Carsten Niebuhr (1733–1815), German-born Danish botanist, explorer, surveyor and sole survivor of Pehr Forsskål’s six-man 1760 expedition to Arabia, the others dying by 1764, probably from malaria. Niebuhr continued the expedition’s work by himself before returning to Copenhagen in 1767. He measured landscapes, described everything he saw in notebooks, copied thousands of cuneiform characters from the ruins of Persepolis (which enabled language experts to decipher the writing) and made detailed drawings and maps that were used for over 100 years. He authored Description of Arabia (1772) and Travels through Arabia (1774–1778). He was a member of the Royal Society of Göttingen and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.