Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin – författare

In 1770 the young German scientist and explorer Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin embarked on a journey on behalf of the Russian Academy of Sciences and in the service of Catherine the Great. These heretofore little-read accounts of his travels and broad research in Northern Persia, first published in German in St Petersburg in the 1770s, have now been translated for the first time into English by renowned scholar Willem Floor. In the two voyages recounted in this volume, Gmelin kept journals describing the customs, industry, political world, warfare, geography, and plant and animal life of Northern Persia, until his capture and imprisonment in the village of Parakay near the Caspian Sea in 1774 -- a misfortune that he also was able to record, and which is included here in the final volume of his travelogue.

In 1770, Astrakhan, on the left bank of the Volga River close to where it discharges into the Caspian Sea, was Russia's most important southern port through which all its trade with Iran and the Orient was conducted. Astrakhan had been a Tatar city until 1556 (when Ivan the Terrible conquered it), a fact reflected in the composition of its population in 1770: Tatars, Russians, Armenians, and Iranians.