BURCKHARDT, JOHN LEWIS (JOHANN LUDWIC) (1784-1817), Swiss traveller and orientalist, was born at Lau sanne on Nov. 24, 1784. After studying at Leipzig and Gottingen he visited England in the summer of 1806, carrying a letter of introduction from the naturalist 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 Lon don 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. He disguised himself as a Muslim, and took the name of Ibrahim Ibn Abdallah. He mastered Arabic and acquired such accurate knowl edge of the Koran, and of the commentaries upon its religion and laws, that the most learned Muslims 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 1813 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 west ward, he made a journey through the Nubian desert in the char acter 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. He returned to Cairo in June 1815 in a state of great exhaustion; but in the spring of 1816 he travelled to Mt. Sinai, whence he returned to Cairo in June, and there again made preparations for his intended journey to Fezzan. Finally, in April 1817, when the long-expected caravan prepared to depart, he was seized with illness and died on Oct. 15. He bequeathed his collection of Boo vols. of oriental mss. to the library of Cambridge university.
His works were published by the African Association in the follow ing order: Travels in Nubia (to which is prefixed a biographical memoir, 1819) ; Travels in Syria and the Holy Land (1822) ; Travels in Arabia (1829) ; Arabic Proverbs, or the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1830) ; Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys (183o).