Joseph Tiefenthaler

To escape Prime Minister Pombal's order for all Jesuits to be expelled from Portuguese controlled areas (in 1759), he left and travelled around North India.

On returning to Agra in 1778, he received the news that the Society of Jesus, the religious order to which he belonged, had been suppressed by Pope Clement XIV.

Besides his native tongue he understood Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Hindustani, Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit.

In geography, he wrote a Descriptio Indiæ, a circumstantial description of the twenty-two provinces of India, of its cities, fortresses, and the most important smaller towns, together with an exact statement of geographical positions, calculated by means of a simple quadrant.

The work also contains a large numbers of maps, plans, and sketches drawn by himself, and the list of geographical positions fills twenty-one quarto pages.

He also prepared a large book of maps on the Ganges Basin, entitled: Cursus Gangæ fluvi Indiæ maximi, inde Priaga seu Elahbado Calcuttam usque ope acus magneticæ exploratus atque litteris mandatus aJ.

In the field of religions he wrote Brahmanism, a work directed against the writings of the Irishman John Zephaniah Holwell and the Scotsman Alexander Dow.

The latter praised the value and importance of the works, especially those on geography, in his address before the French Academy of Sciences (Journal des Scavans, Dec., 1776), and made the writing of Tiefenthaler partly accessible to the academic world in his Recherches hist.

A part of the manuscripts in Copenhagen were obtained by the German scholar Johann Bernoulli of Berlin who used them in connection with the Recherches of Anquetil for the work Des Pater Joseph Tieffenthalers d. Ges.