Editing Carsten Niebuhr (section)

==Writing and research==
Niebuhr's first book, ''Beschreibung von Arabien'', was published in Copenhagen in 1772, the Danish government providing subsidies for the engraving and printing of its numerous illustrations. This was followed in 1774 and 1778 by the first two volumes of Niebuhr's ''Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegender Ländern''. These works (particularly the one published in 1778), and most specifically the accurate copies of the cuneiform inscriptions found at Persepolis, were to prove to be extremely important to the decipherment of cuneiform writing. Before Niebuhr's publication, cuneiform inscriptions were often thought to be merely decorations and embellishments, and no accurate decipherments or translations had been made up to that point. Niebuhr demonstrated that the three trilingual inscriptions found at Persepolis were in fact three distinct forms of cuneiform writing (which he termed Class I, Class II, and Class III) to be read from left to right. His accurate copies of the trilingual inscriptions gave Orientalists the key to finally crack the cuneiform code, leading to the discovery of Old Persian, Akkadian, and Sumerian.<ref>Kramer, Samuel Noah. ''The Sumerians: Their History, Culture and Character''. University of Chicago Press, 1963</ref>
[[File:Niebuhr - Kriegsübungen der Araber in Yemen.jpg|thumb|"War Exercises of the Arabs in Yemen", original print from Niebuhr's ''Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegender Ländern'', 1774-1778]]
The third volume of the ''Reisebeschreibung'', also based on materials from the expedition, was not published till 1837, long after Niebuhr's death, under the editorship of his daughter and his assistant, Johan Nicolaus Gloyer. Niebuhr also contributed papers on the interior of [[Africa]], the political and military condition of the [[Ottoman Empire]], and other subjects to a German periodical, the ''[[Deutsches Museum (magazine)|Deutsches Museum]]''. In addition, he edited and published the work of his friend Peter Forsskål, the naturalist on the Arabian expedition, under the titles ''Descriptiones animalium, Flora Aegyptiaco-Arabica'' and ''Icones rerum naturalium'' (Copenhagen, 1775 and 1776).{{sfn|Chisholm|1911}}

[[French language|French]] and [[Dutch language|Dutch]] translations of Niebuhr's narratives were published during his lifetime, and a condensed English translation of his own three volumes, prepared by [[Robert Heron (writer)|Robert Heron]], was published in Edinburgh in 1792, under the title "Travels through Arabia". A facsimile edition of this translation, as by "M. Niebuhr", was published in two volumes by the Libraire du Liban, Beirut (undated).

The government funds covered only a fraction of the printing costs for Niebuhr's first book, and probably a similar or smaller proportion of the costs for the other two volumes. To ensure that the volumes were published, Niebuhr had to pay over 80% of the costs himself. In all, Niebuhr devoted ten years of his life, the years 1768–1778, to the publication of six volumes of findings from the expedition. He had virtually no help from the academics who had conceived and shaped the expedition in [[Göttingen]] and Copenhagen. It was only Niebuhr's determination to publish the findings of the expedition that ensured that the Danish Arabia expedition would produce results that would benefit the world of scholarship.<ref name="Lawrence J 1767"/>