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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Josef Menges | 1/2 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Menges | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T10:07:33.294691+00:00 | kb-cron |
Jakob Josef Menges (7 October 1850– 4 January 1910) was a German explorer, naturalist, zoologist, cartographer, trader and author. During the 1870s and until the end of the 19th century, Menges undertook commercial and scientific expeditions in Northeast Africa and the Horn of Africa.
His routes took him through the Turco-Egyptian Sudan, the interior of British Somaliland and Abyssinia in modern-day Ethiopia. To fund his journeys, Menges published travel and research reports on the region's geography, zoology and ethnology in German scientific journals. Later in life, he focused on animal trading, supplying exotic animals to European zoos, as well as facilitating human shows of Somali people in Europe.
== Biography ==
=== Early life and education === Josef Menges was the son of Joseph Menges and his wife Maria Josepha Diefenbach. His father was the last Thurn-und-Taxis postmaster of Limburg an der Lahn, actively involved in local politics and elected mayor in 1877. Josef Menges attended the Realgymnasium in Limburg and completed training as a railway official in Frankfurt am Main.
=== Travels === After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the coastal regions of the Horn of Africa drew growing attention from foreign governments, companies, and private actors, all seeking to capitalize on their strategic, economic, and logistical advantages. As Menges was especially interested in Northeast Africa, he applied to serve under British Major-General Charles George Gordon in the Turco-Egyptian Sudan. As Gordon’s secretary, he journeyed from 1873 to 1874 along the White Nile from Khartoum down to Gondokoro in present-day South Sudan. After illness and other difficulties forced him to leave Gordon’s service, he continued traveling in the region and, around 1876, began collaborating with Hamburg circus manager Carl Hagenbeck across a broad territory extending from Egyptian Sudan to the Somali lands. The Mahdist War in Sudan (1881–1899) severely disrupted Hagenbeck’s animal trade, effectively halting exports from the region. In response, Menges expanded his operations into Abyssinia, French Somaliland (modern-day Djibouti), and British Somaliland. At that time, the Somali territories were rich in wildlife, much of which was either shipped to Europe in large quantities or pursued locally as game.
=== Geographical reports === While staying in Somaliland, Menges undertook at least four major expeditions, each of which was subsequently cartographically improved and published by the Perthes publishing house in Germany. Altogether, he covered roughly 626 kilometres on foot and documented a region measuring about 6,000 square kilometers. On his expeditions he documented climate conditions with daily meteorological measurements, determined geographical altitudes and recordings of temperatures. Based on his detailed journals, including itineraries, descriptive notes on trade routes and observations on vegetation and mountainous formations, Menges produced scientific reports and detailed hand-drawn sketches of these regions. Menges produced small sketches for maps according to consistent principles. His equipment were a watch, a thermometer, a compass, an aneroid barometer and a degree circle. With these instruments, he took dozens of measurements every day. He worked to scale, calculating roughly 1 mm in his notebook as equal to about 100 steps on the ground (so 1 cm represented around 670 meters), and adjusted his records to account for slower travel, for example in mountainous areas. These draft maps traced his route with exact hours and minutes for each change of direction, also indicated bearings in degrees in relation to the North–South axis, and marked significant landmarks. He employed common cartographic signs — lines for routes, circles for heights— while also devising additional symbols for notable trees, forts, water wells, and ruins. These drafts were later converted into professional geographical maps, for example by cartographer Bruno Hassenstein.
Apart from Menges, other explorers had travelled and mapped regions of Northeast Africa. In 1860 Theodor von Heuglin had collaborated with Hassenstein on a map of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. In 1874 Gustav Adolf Haggenmacher and August Petermann produced a map of the Berbera hinterland of Somaliland, and in 1885 Philipp Paulitschke, Hassenstein and Carl Barich mapped the route from the town of Zayla in Somaliland to Harar in Ethiopia.Travel reports and geographical maps of Africa by Menges and other German cartographers were published in Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen by Perthes publishers in Gotha, Germany. This oldest German-language geography journal produced many major geographic discoveries of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Perthes focused on these regions because new maps of little-known parts of Africa filled gaps in geographic knowledge and gave its journal exclusive material. By selling new findings by explorers on the ground, the publisher strengthened its reputation, outpaced competitors in France, Britain, and Germany, and enhanced its standing in the German Empire as an important center for overseas information.
=== Ethnographic and zoological reports === Menges was also interested in the people he encountered. He published his observations on their ways of life, cultures and environments in scientific journals and maintained frequent contact with leading ethnologists and ethnological museums.During his journeys he became familiar not only with foreign lands and cultures but also with their flora and fauna. He recorded observations of wildlife with the same care he applied to landscapes and climates, publishing his findings in journals such as Der Zoologische Garten and Globus – Illustrirte Zeitschrift für Länder und Völkerkunde. In his 1887 report Ausflug ins Somaliland (Excursion into Somaliland), he described two local species of antilopes and the Somali wild ass. In 1883, he obtained a foal of the same rare animal and transported it to Hamburg, where it was kept in captivity for a period. In 1894 Menges was the first to publish a scientific report about the Beira antelope species that was initially classified as a klipspringer (Oreotragus megalotis).