The lecture describes the little known research on Ethiopia done by Carsten Niebuhr, member of the Royal danish Expedition to Arabia in 1761-67. The results of Niebuhr's studies are represented in a little known article in a German scholarly journal, in an appendix to volume 3 of Niebuhr's Reisebeschreibung, published 22 years after his death, and in a previously unpublished manuscript found in the Goethe archive in Weimar. The texts are compared with the well known descriptions of Ethiopia by the almost contemporary and well known Scottish traveller James Bruce.