Charles Tilstone Beke

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Charles Tilstone Beke (1800–1874) was an English traveller, geographer, and Bible critic. He was born in Stepney, London, the son of a city merchant. After a few years in trade, he studied law at Lincoln’s Inn and practiced for a time, but he later devoted himself to history, geography, and ethnography.

His first major work, Origines Biblicae (1834), tried to reconstruct the early history of humankind from geological data. It sparked strong opposition from defenders of traditional readings of the Bible, but the University of Tübingen awarded him a PhD in recognition of his research.

Between 1837 and 1838 Beke served as acting British consul in Saxony. After that, he focused on geographical studies, especially of the Nile valley. He joined a mission to Shewa in Ethiopia led by Major William Cornwallis Harris and explored regions like Gojjam. He was the first to determine the course of the Blue Nile with notable accuracy. He published many findings in journals of the Royal Geographical Society from 1840 to 1843. On returning to London, he went back to business but kept studying geography.

In 1848 he planned an expedition from the Africa mainland opposite Zanzibar to find the Nile’s sources, though little was achieved. He correctly believed the White Nile was the main river. In 1856 he tried, without success, to establish trade with Ethiopia through Massawa. In 1861–1862 he and his wife traveled in Syria and Palestine, then went to Egypt to promote trade with Central Africa and to grow cotton in the Sudan.

In 1865 he tried to visit Ethiopia to secure the release of British captives. When the captives were released, they were later re-arrested. Beke provided valuable information to the military efforts to free them and was rewarded with £500 in 1868 and a civil-list pension of £100 in 1870.

At the age of 74 he traveled to Egypt to study Mount Sinai and argued it lay on the eastern side of the Gulf of Aqaba; this view has not gained general acceptance. He died in Bromley, Kent.

Beke wrote many works besides Origines Biblicae, including An Essay on the Nile and its Tributaries (1847), The Sources of the Nile (1860), and The British Captives in Abyssinia (1865). He was a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, which awarded him its gold medal for his work on Ethiopia, and he also received the gold medal of the French Société de Géographie. He later returned the French medal after a dispute over the statements of a rival Ethiopian explorer, Antoine Thomson d’Abbadie.