Ulrich Jasper Seetzen

Who was Ulrich Jasper Seetzen?

Ulrich Jasper Seetzen was a German explorer of Arabia and Palestine from Jever, German Frisia.

His father sent him to the University of Göttingen, where he graduated in medicine. His chief interests, however, were in natural history and technology; he wrote papers on both these subjects which gained him some reputation, and had both in view in making a series of journeys through the Netherlands and Germany. He also engaged in various small manufactures, and in 1802 obtained a government post in Jever, however, the interest which he had long felt in geographical exploration culminated in a resolution to travel.

In the summer of 1802 he started down the Danube with a companion Jacobsen, who broke down at Smyrna a year later. His journey was by Constantinople, where he stayed six months, thence through Asia Minor to Smyrna, then again through the heart of Asia Minor to Aleppo, where he remained from November 1803 to April 1805, and made himself sufficiently at home with Arabic speech and ways to travel as a native. Now began the part of his travels of which a full journal has been published, a series of most instructive journeys in eastern and western Palestine and the wilderness of Sinai, and so on to Cairo and the Fayum.