From Berlin to the Coral Sea: Sea and Islands in the Red Sea Expedition of Wilhelm Hemprich and Christian Ehrenberg (1824-1825).

Roxani Margariti∗1

1Emory University – Etats-Unis´

R´esum´e

From Berlin to the Coral Sea: Sea and Islands in the Red Sea Expedition of Wilhelm Hemprich and Christian Ehrenberg (1824-1825). In 1820 a pair of young Prussian naturalists secured funds to travel to Egypt and the Levant to collect faunal and floral specimens for Berlin’s budding zoological collections. Three years later, Hemprich and Ehrenberg extended their travels and research to the Red Sea, first exploring the Gulf of Suez but subsequently pushing further south and eventually reaching as far as the coast of Abyssinia, present-day Eritrea. Their journey was marked by tragedy-Hemprich never made it back to Berlin, having succumbed to illness in Massawa. Yet the samples, drawings and observations that resulted from their persistent and painstaking efforts led to influential early publications of Red Sea natural history. More importantly, this material offers a fascinating window into routes and natural conditions on both coasts of the Red Sea and its islands but also into the networks of knowledge-crucially involving local interlocutors-that made possible the recording of that natural world. This paper presents an overview of the published and unpublished materials from the Hemprich-Ehrenberg expedition in the Red Sea and makes the case that its nachlass constitutes, at least partly, a palimpsest of local knowledge, knowledge of maritime topography and of marine and insular biota.

∗Intervenant

sciencesconf.org:redsea9:245174