Theodor Graf

Theodor Graf (born March 11, 1840 in Engerda ( Thuringia ), † November 25, 1903 in Rodaun ) was an Austrian carpet and art dealer .

Theodor Graf worked as a carpet dealer in Vienna and had a branch in Cairo . Inspired by Joseph von Karabacek , he began looking for papyri and late antique (" Coptic ") textiles in Egypt from 1881 onwards . For example, he had excavations carried out in Arsinoe and Herakleopolis , where he found several thousand papyri and textiles. In 1883 an exhibition of his finds took place in the Austrian Museum for Art and Industry in Vienna, the museum bought large parts of the pieces, the papyri were acquired by Archduke Rainer , who then donated them to the court library . Graf subsequently acquired other late antique textiles from the Achmim necropolis and sold them to museums around the world. In 1887 he acquired over 300 mummy portraits . He showed some of them at sales exhibitions in Europe and the USA, the rest was sold by his heirs after his death. So he became the main source of mummy portraits in museums around the world.

literature

• Klaus Parlasca : Mummy portraits and related monuments. Steiner, Wiesbaden 1966, pp. 23-29.
• Alfred Bernhard-Walcher: Theodor Graf and the rediscovery of the mummy portraits. In: Wilfried Seipel (Ed.): Pictures from the desert sand. Mummy portraits from the Egyptian Museum. Vienna 1998, 27–35.
• Morris L. Bierbrier: Who was who in Egyptology . 4th revised edition. Egypt Exploration Society. London 2012, ISBN 978-0-85698-207-1 , pp. 219-220.
• Stefan Heid : Theodor Graf. In: Stefan Heid, Martin Dennert (Hrsg.): Personal Lexicon for Christian Archeology. Researchers and personalities from the 16th to the 21st century . Schnell & Steiner, Regensburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-7954-2620-0 , Vol. 1, pp. 603-604.

Web links

• Metropolitan Museum of Art: Buried Finds: Textile Collectors in Egypt. Theodor Graf (1840–1903)
• Austrian National Library: History of the papyrus collection (with picture)