Waldemar Belck

Waldemar Belck (born February 25, 1862 in Danzig ; † September 6, 1932 in Frankfurt / Main ) was a German chemist and amateur archaeologist .

Live and act

After studying chemistry, he worked as a soil explorer for the Bremen company Dyes & Albrecht in what was later to become German South-West Africa (today's Namibia) . There he took part in an expedition from Angra Pequena to Otjimbingwe in 1884/85 as Lüderitz 'agent in Walfischbai . As a result of this expedition, some plants were named after Belck ( Acrotome belckii , Crotalaria belckii , and Crinum belckianum ).

In 1888 he received his doctorate in Halle with the dissertation "On the passivity of iron" . In the same year he joined Siemens and Halske as an electrochemist and went to the company's Kedabeg copper works in the Caucasus .

The opportunity offered here for prehistoric studies prompted him to travel to Armenia in 1891 , where he got to know the unimagined cultural development of the Chaldeans , the Turanian indigenous people, discovered numerous remains of their buildings and collected many inscriptions, which he shared with him after his return (1892) Carl Ferdinand Friedrich Lehmann-Haupt , since 1893 private lecturer in ancient history at Berlin University, worked on.

Fonts (selection)

• History of Montanism, its origins, aim and nature, as well as a brief description and criticism of the most important views raised about it. A study of the philosophy of religion. Dörffling and Franke, Leipzig 1883, ( digitized ).
• The Kelischin stele and its Chaldic-Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions. (= Anatole. 1, ZDB ID 543345-9 ). Rüger, Freienwalde (Oder) et al. 1904.
• Contributions to the ancient geography and history of the Near East. 2 volumes. E. Pfeiffer, Leipzig 1901.

literature

• Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon, Volume 2. Leipzig 1905, p. 583 .

Web links

• Alexander Ruhe: Frankfurt's Schliemann; the self-made archaeologist Belck. Oct. 2011, an article from the series: Frankfurter Zeitungs-Archäologie