Heinrich Brugsch

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Photograph by Heinrich Brugsch shortly before his death

Heinrich Ferdinand Karl Brugsch (born February 18, 1827 in Berlin , † September 9, 1894 in Charlottenburg ; also known as Heinrich Brugsch-Pascha ) was a German Egyptologist .

Life

Heinrich Brugsch was born in 1827 into a Prussian family of soldiers. His parents Ernst Wilhelm and Dorothea initially planned a baptism for him according to the Protestant confession, but according to the will of his Silesian grandfather Johann Karl Brugsch, Heinrich was finally baptized a Catholic .

Heinrich developed an early interest in the works of Greek historians and the descriptions of the Bible. He attended the French grammar school in Berlin, where he was subordinate to a former war comrade of his father, the extremely strict professor Kohlheim. At the end of the school year 1834, Brugsch received a bad report and then moved to the Kölln high school , where he developed into a model student. Specifically encouraged by his teachers and motivated to perform, he developed a strong interest in the culture of ancient Egypt .

The royal collection of Egyptian antiquities in the Castle Monbijou sought Brugsch common and the basics of ancient Egyptian writing and language began to teach there. The director of the museum, Giuseppe Passalacqua , encouraged the young enthusiast's efforts and made his library accessible to him. The helpful support prompted Heinrich to deal with the constitution of a grammar of the demotic . Karl Richard Lepsius became aware of the young high school student and went to his parents' house to find out about him. Presumably because of his personal aversion to Passalacqua, Lepsius classified Brugsch as a mediocre student without much potential. An attempt by Brugsch to attend lectures with Karl Richard Lepsius before completing his Abitur was rejected by Lepsius. Even later, the relationship with Lepsius could not be improved.

In 1845 Brugsch joined the Teutonia Berlin fraternity . Despite irregular school attendance, Brugsch not only passed the Abitur at the Köllnisches Gymnasium in 1848, but was also able to publish his first scriptura Aegyptiorum demotica in the same year , in which he referred to himself as Discipulus primae classis gymnasii realis . In it he stylized himself as an ingenious decipherer of demotic writing, but he was able to fall back on previous work by Thomas Young . King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. And Alexander von Humboldt noticed him and encouraged Brugsch in every possible way.

With such support, he was able to go on study trips to Paris , London and Turin without any worries . He took up studies in philology and archeology in Berlin and was able to undertake a scientific trip to Egypt in 1853 at the expense of the king . Here he met the French researcher Auguste Mariette , who carried out excavations near Memphis .

In 1851 Brugsch married Pauline Harcke in Berlin; with her he had a daughter and three sons, according to other sources two daughters and four sons. One of the witnesses was Alexander von Humboldt .

After his return in 1854 he qualified as a professor at Berlin University with a thesis on Hegelian philosophy. In addition to his appointment as a private lecturer, he also became an assistant at the Egyptian Museum , which was then headed by Giuseppe "Joseph" Passalacqua.

A second trip took him back to Egypt from 1857 to 1858. Their results were published between 1857 and 1860 and thus created the basis for all research into the pre-Greek geography of Egypt and its neighboring countries.

In an official capacity he accompanied a Prussian embassy under the direction of Baron Julius von Minutoli to Persia (May 1860 to June 1861). In 1864, Brugsch founded the Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprach und Altertumskunde in Berlin , the oldest specialist Egyptological journal. In the autumn of 1864 he was appointed Prussian consul in Cairo .

In 1867 he published his hieroglyphic-demotic dictionary , which was published in Leipzig. In the foreword to this large-scale four-volume work (1728 pages), Brugsch felt compelled to defend himself against the charge that his plan was premature because the meaning of many words was still too uncertain. The number of lemmas had risen to 4650 and had been sorted alphabetically according to their transcription. Brugsch assumed that the users of his dictionary would have learned to read and transcribe ancient Egyptian scripts. For this transcription he no longer used the Coptic letters such as Jean-François Champollion , but rather Latin letters with diacritical marks. Brugsch had considered hieroglyphic-hieratic and demotic material equally. Just 13 years later (1880–1882) he completed his dictionary with three more volumes, with hardly fewer (1418) pages than the first four and with the same number of partly new, partly revised lemmas.

In 1868 Brugsch returned to Germany, where he married Antonie Verständig for the second time (the marriage resulted in five more sons, including the doctor Theodor Brugsch ) and was appointed professor of Egyptology at the University of Göttingen . Here he found it difficult to get used to the scientific community, and so in 1870 he followed the request of the Viceroy of Egypt, Ismail Pascha , to take over the management of the Ecole d'Égyptologie established in Cairo . His brother Emil Brugsch accompanied him .

Heinrich Brugsch's gravestone

In 1873 he was raised to the rank of Bey . In the same year he represented Egypt at the world exhibition in Vienna . In 1877 he also represented this country at the Philadelphia Industrial Exhibition .

After the viceroy was overthrown, Brugsch returned to Berlin in 1879. He hoped to be named as Auguste Mariette's successor in the service of antiquities in Egypt, but only French were employed until Nasser's time.

In 1881 he received the title of pasha from Tawfiq , son and successor of Ismail Pasha as viceroy . In the same year he accompanied the Crown Prince of Austria , Rudolf von Habsburg , to Philae . He spent the years 1882 and 1883 with Prince Friedrich Karl Nikolaus of Prussia on trips through Egypt and Syria .

Back in Berlin he was a private lecturer at the university. In 1884 he was asked to travel to Persia as a member of a German embassy. There he was accredited as a legation counselor at the court of the Shah .

In 1891 and 1892 he returned one last time to Egypt and the Libyan Desert to purchase Egyptian antiquities on behalf of the state.

From 1876 Brugsch was a corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences . In 1887 he was elected a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg .

Heinrich Brugsch died on September 9, 1894 in Charlottenburg at the age of 67. He was buried in the evangelical Luisenfriedhof III . The cover of a sarcophagus from the Egyptian Old Kingdom served as a tombstone .

Publications

Note: Wikisource provides evidence of online digital copies .

literature

Web links

Commons : Heinrich Brugsch  - Collection of Images
Wikisource: Heinrich Brugsch  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Thomas Gertzen: The 'Big One' (1827-1894) and the 'Little One' (1842-1930) Brugsch. In: Kemet , Issue 4/2007, pp. 78-80.
  2. ^ Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians, Part 1: A – E. Heidelberg 1996, p. 146.
  3. ↑ Hanno Beck: Alexander von Humboldt as a patron . In: Wolfgang-Hagen Hein (Ed.): Alexander von Humboldt. Life and work . Boehringer, Ingelheim 1985, ISBN 3-921037-55-7 , pp. 303-307 .
  4. ^ Theodor Brugsch: History of a family of scholars . Verlag der Nation, Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-373-00073-4 .
  5. ^ A b Friedrich Wilhelm von Bissing :  Brugsch, Heinrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1955, ISBN 3-428-00183-4 , p. 667 f. ( Digitized version ).
  6. ↑ Peter Dils: The Project Ancient Egyptian Dictionary and the History of Ancient Egyptian Word Research , in: Thoughts. Journal of the Saxon Academy of Sciences, Issue 4, 2010, pp. 149–150
  7. ^ Members of the previous academies. Heinrich Karl Brugsch (Pasha). Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences , accessed on March 3, 2015 .
  8. ^ Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1724. Heinrich Karl Brugsch, Pascha. Russian Academy of Sciences, accessed August 5, 2015 (Russian).
personal data
SURNAME Brugsch, Heinrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Brugsch, Heinrich Karl (full name); Brugsch-Pascha, Heinrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Egyptologist
DATE OF BIRTH February 18, 1827
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH September 9, 1894
Place of death Charlottenburg (today Berlin)