Julius Euting's Journey to Northern Syria in 1890

Julius Euting (1839–1913) was a Swabian scholar and traveller to the Orient. He studied theology and Oriental languages at the University of Tübingen, where he later worked as a librarian. In 1871, his career took him to Strasbourg, where he became an honorary professor of Semitic languages in 1880 and director of the university library in 1900.

His estate at the University of Tübingen includes 26 diaries and ten sketchbooks, which were digitized between 2011 and 2013 and have been publicly accessible ever since. In 2013–2014, the diaries from his trip to northern Syria (1890) were published as a digital edition with an interactive map by the then eScience-Center at the University of Tübingen. Over time, this edition became increasingly difficult to maintain and was replaced in 2025 by a version built using standard JavaScript libraries. The new edition, created by the Digital Humanities master's specialization and the Digital Humanities Center, now provides the complete text of the journey and the excavation at Zincirli, directed by Felix von Luschan.

The diaries offer a variety of starting points for further historical research, for example, on the history of Oriental studies, 19th-century travel literature, or the cultural history of the Middle East.