Karl Bellino

Karl Bellino (born January 21, 1791 in Rottenburg am Neckar , † November 13, 1820 in Mosul in the north of today's Iraq) was an orientalist , interpreter, captain and secretary of Claudius James Rich in the Baghdad residency of the British East India Company .

Youth and education

Karl Bellino came to what was then the Kingdom of Württemberg as the first-born son of the merchant Franz Joseph Bellino and Anna, née. Belk von Günzburg, to the world. At the age of ten he came to Stuttgart and attended high school there for four years under the direction of Prof. Wekherlin. He spent the following two years partly with his parents and partly with a friend of his father's, the factory owner Köhler in Spaichingen . He learned the trade as well as some European languages. Then he came to the Jacob & Comp. to Reims in France, where he worked intensively on oriental languages.

During his stays in Paris, which often lasted several months, he used the libraries and acquired many oriental works. The father, whether this enthusiasm for the Orient was skeptical, asked Prof. Christian Friedrich von Schnurrer in Tübingen for advice, who after an interview with Karl Bellino recommended that his progress be so extraordinary that the father should let him study only the oriental languages. In Vienna he was supported by his aunt and her husband, Field Marshal Lieutenants von Hohenbruk. He went to the " Oriental Academy " there and achieved such great success in law and the oriental languages ​​during his four-year studies that Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall sold him to Claudius James Rich, Minister-Resident from Baghdad, who was on vacation in Vienna recommended.

Baghdad

In 1815 Karl entered the service of the British government as private secretary, interpreter and captain Rich, traveling to Baghdad via Italy, Greece, Constantinople and Asia Minor, where he spent almost five years with several important scholars (Chancellor von Schnurrer in Stuttgart, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall in Vienna and Georg Friedrich Grotefend in Frankfurt) corresponded on antiquity research. He visited the most important ruins of Asia Minor and Persia , especially those of Babylon , as evidenced by several letters to his parents and siblings. Karl Bellino mastered nine languages ​​and made great contributions to the scientific research of this region. In a letter dated 1819, Rich describes "Charles" Bellino as " an extraordinarily eager young man who worked constantly in his office and could only rarely be induced to go horseback riding." Bellino became a master at carefully copying cuneiform inscriptions . Its copies have been published in books by Rich, Robert Ker Porter, and Georg Friedrich Grotefend. When it was possible to decipher cuneiform writing almost 40 years later, its copies turned out to be astonishingly accurate. Robert Ker Porter describes Bellino as “ a young man with a uniquely lovable disposition that anyone could just love. "

A cylinder made of fired clay in a slightly concave shape was named after Karl Bellino, who copied the inscription.

Letter from Rich about the death of Karl Bellino

At the beginning of February 1821 Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall communicated the news of Karl Bellino's death by copying the English letter sent to him by Claudius James Rich:

Mosul, Nov. 13, 1820

A sad duty strikes both of us, but doubly arduous for you, and I would have liked to have spared you if I knew some way of conveying this news to my sad friends with caution and care. Poor Bellino is no more, and I rely on you to give this sad news to his friends in the most gentle way possible. I believe that anyone who takes any interest in the excellent young man will not be unwelcome to hear about the last moments of his life .... When we were in eastern Kurdistan, I gave the good Bellino permission to admit himself to visit the antiquities of Hamadan, which has long been his favorite idea. In Kurdistan it had been a little indisposed with an ordinary deviation, from which it was completely manufactured. He went to Hamadan, fresh and healthy, which has one of the best climates in all of Persia. He had an Italian doctor with him who had lived in Baghdad and Kurdistan for some time and took this opportunity from Bellino's trip to see Persia. Bellino left us in Sina, from where I went on a detour to Salimania.

In the meantime, however, Bellino developed a malignant biliary fever in Hamadan, which forced him to give up any thought of copying the inscriptions and to return to us. In Salimania he was in a better condition than he had been, but still not completely free of the fever and swollen feet. Under the care of Mr. Bell, the doctor of the residence, who looked after him like his own brother, it was soon restored; the fever and all bad symptoms disappeared completely, and in a short time he found himself sufficiently well to continue the journey for a few days until we arrived here, where the air, especially at this time of year, is incomparably good for convalescents. He made the journey partly in my wife's sedan chair and partly in a covered chair; and he was evidently better on the way, so that no one had the slightest doubt about his recovery.

Indeed, I regret that our journey did not last longer, for movement appropriate to his strength has always been very beneficial for him. A short time after we got here he began to lose heart, a slight diarrhea weakened him considerably, and slackness and indifference took hold of his mind more and more, making it impossible for us, despite our best efforts to persuade him, only to use the least strength. My wife never looked after him. In the evening she persuaded him to take a ride with her, which seemed to amuse him. The day before yesterday he rode out again for half an hour and it seemed to be doing well. Nobody had the slightest idea that he was in any danger, nor did he complain; the slight diarrhea ceased entirely. He always came to the table and showed an appetite that required constant memory; yet his strength always diminished; he became more and more limp and sad. Yesterday morning he wanted his breakfast in bed, I found him very weak, but better than the night before. This was also Mr. Bell's opinion, who did not leave him for a moment, day or night; he ate his breakfast with appetite and asked that he would be given some milk-coffee around noon and some rice towards evening. Poor B ellino! He no longer saw the sunset. Immediately after breakfast he became noticeably worse, was quite exhausted, and could hardly speak, the diarrhea attacked him more violently than before. I came to him and never left him. I found it necessary to send for a minister because there was almost no doubt that his recovery would never happen. When the clergyman came, he was very satisfied with it and said that he had always confessed to and communicated with a Catholic clergyman who was educated in Italy. He lost consciousness more and more, and quietly fell asleep around 4 o'clock in the afternoon.

My wife, as you can easily imagine, is heartbroken; Yes, really, we are all, he was an excellent, kind-hearted young man, and his quick manner only made him more pleasant, and it is only with real pain that we remember him. The Catholic bishop of the church district watched over his corpse through the night. This morning I paid my last respects to my esteemed friend. I accompanied him to the Catholic churchyard with the whole residence; the bishop with all the clergy rendered him their final service. I made arrangements for the required number of masses to be read with due solemnity in the Catholic Church, and I had a monument placed on his grave for him. I have now finished the sad story; I can't go any further, I'm too sad. Poor Bellino is not one of those easy to forget. Good luck for the future.

Your sincere Claudius James Rich.

literature

• Württemberg year books for statistics and regional studies , published by JDG Memminger, year 1823, part 1, JG Cotta'sche Buchhandlung Stuttgart and Tübingen 1823, p. 72–80 full text (source of this article, here p. 76–80 the letter from Rich) .
• Hans Joachim Kissling:  Bellino, Karl. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1955, ISBN 3-428-00183-4 , p. 31 ( digitized version ).
• Wolfgang Schramm: Carl Bellino to G. Fr. Grotefend. Letters and inscriptions . In: Journal for Assyriology and Near Eastern Archeology . Volume 64, 1974, pp. 250-290, ISSN  0084-5299 (print), ISSN  1613-1150 (online), DOI: 10.1515 / zava.1974.64.2.250 .
• RD Barnett: Charles Bellino and the Beginnings of Assyriology. In: Iraq. 36, 1974, ISSN  0021-0889 , pp. 5-28.
• Friedrich Schipper (Ed.): Between the Euphrates and the Tigris. Austrian research on the ancient Orient (= Viennese open oriental studies. Vol. 3). Lit, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-8258-8257-8 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Morgenblatt from 1819, as well as in the supplement to Allgemeine Zeitung No. 63, 1819.
2. ↑ The Bellino cylinder in the British Museum .