War, revolution and egyptology: letters of Eduard Naville and Vladimir Golenishchev (1916–1921)
Abstract
This article studies the correspondence between the Swiss Egyptologist Eduard Naville and the prominent Russian Egyptologist Vladimir Golenishchev, the collector of antiquities that laid the cornerstone for the Egyptian department of A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. This correspondence is preserved at Vladimir Golenishchev Archives, Paris. In the 1910s, both Naville and Golenishchev were considered to represent the senior generation of the European Egyptology still keeping the traditions of its “heroic age” of the middle of the 19th century, when the French Egyptological school played the main role. However, in the 1880s, German Egyptology, specifi cally its Berlin school (A. Erman, K. Sethe, etc.), took the leadership: it developed the theory of the Ancient Egyptian language, and its methodology was followed by scholars entering this fi eld of research from the 1890s onwards (among them Golenishchev’s close friend, the British Egyptologist Alan H. Gardiner). Naville and Golenishchev strongly opposed a number of views proposed by Berlin school, especially the treatment of the Egyptian linguistic phenomena from the viewpoint of Semitology. In the letters discussed, Naville proposed to Golenishchev to launch a campaign against Berlin school taking the advantage of the imminent loss of Germany in World War I and the general indignation of the Entente nations against Germans. Golenishchev took this idea especially willingly at the end of 1918, when his own interests were negatively aff ected by the war and the revolution that started in Russia. However, this campaign against Berlin school did not start and, in any case, hardly had a prospect of success. The scholars’ correspondence also refl ected the specifi c episodes of war and revolutionary developments in Russia.
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