Wilhelm Spiegelberg
Wilhelm Spiegelberg (born June 25, 1870 in Hanover , † December 23, 1930 in Munich ) was a German Egyptologist . He stood out for his authoritative research on demotic papyri .
life and work
Wilhelm Spiegelberg grew up as the second oldest of four brothers in a German-Jewish family. His parents were Antonie geb. Dux and the banker Eduard Spiegelberg. Already at the grammar school, the Lyceum II in Hanover, he showed great interest in linguistics, especially for the ancient Egyptian language and culture, which was newly researched at the time . From 1888 he studied in Strasbourg , among others with the Egyptologist Johannes Dümichen and the classical archaeologist Adolf Michaelis and in Berlin with Adolf Erman among others . Soon he was considered a specialist in demotic and hieratic texts. In Strasbourg he received his doctorate in 1892 with a thesis on the legal system of the pharaonic empire of Dynasties XVIII-XXI . After studying in Paris with Gaston Maspero , he completed his habilitation in 1894, again at the University of Strasbourg. During this time Spiegelberg researched the necropolis of Thebes and the social and administrative conditions in the New Kingdom , as derived from inscriptions and papyri. 1895-99 he traveled several times to Egypt , where he, u. a. in Thebes, also led excavations . In 1899 he became an associate professor in Strasbourg, succeeding his teacher Dümichen. His inaugural lecture dealt with workers and the labor movement in the Pharaonic Empire under the Ramessids . In the same year he married Elisabeth von Recklinghausen (1872–1948), daughter of the Strasbourg pathologist Friedrich Daniel von Recklinghausen . The marriage had three sons: Reinhard (* 1900), Erwin (1901–1938, chemist) and Herbert (1904–1990, philosopher).
In the years after 1900 Wilhelm Spiegelberg began at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo to process and catalog the demotic objects there; the extensive series of publications "Demotic Studies" began with this. He soon became the leading demotist of his generation alongside Francis Llewellyn Griffith . In addition to an almost unbelievable flood of demotic text editions, he made significant contributions to the deciphering of demotic writing and in the field of demotic lexicography.
From 1907 to 1918 he was full professor of Egyptology in Strasbourg. At the beginning of 1919, because of the French occupation of Alsace-Lorraine, he had to move to Heidelberg due to the Treaty of Versailles , where he worked as an honorary professor. In the following four years he worked on the Coptic Concise Dictionary (1921).
In 1923 Wilhelm Spiegelberg took over the chair for Egyptology in Munich , where he also set up the Egyptological seminar. During his time in Munich he advised Thomas Mann extensively on Egyptological issues in the preparation of his Joseph novel and accompanied him on a trip to Egypt.
Spiegelberg had been an extraordinary member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences since 1919 and an external member since 1923. The Bavarian Academy of Sciences elected him a full member in 1924.
In 1930 he had converted to Christianity and died in Munich after an operation. A few days before his death, he published an essay in which he identified a papyrus as a fragment of the ancient oriental novel Achikar and thus confirmed its reception in Egypt. Many years of work on a demotic dictionary based on the state of research remained unfinished. The manuscript came to the University of Chicago Oriental Institute through his student William F. Edgerton . The Chicago Demotic Dictionary is based not least on Spiegelberg's preliminary work.
Fonts (selection)
- Studies and materials on the legal system of the pharaonic empire of Dynasties XVIII-XXI (approx. 1500–1000 BC) . Hanover, commission publisher of the Hahnschen Buchhandlung 1892 (= dissertation).
- History of Egyptian Art up to Hellenism. Shown in demolition . Hinrichs, Leipzig 1903
- The script and language of the ancient Egyptians . Hinrichs, Leipzig 1907 (The Old Orient, 8th year, issue 2)
literature
- Erwin Seidl : Wilhelm Spiegelberg (Necrologio) , in: Aegyptus 11, 1931, pp. 195-201.
- Alfred Grimm , Sylvia Schoske : Wilhelm Spiegelberg as a collector. Lipp, Munich 1995, (= RAMSES, H. 1) ISBN 3-87490-606-X .
- Morris L. Bierbrier: Who was Who in Egyptology , 3rd revised edition, London 1995, pp. 400-401 (with list of major works and obituaries).
- Frédéric Colin: Comment la création d'une 'bibliothèque de papyrus' à Strasbourg compensa la perte des manuscrits précieux brûlés dans le siège de 1870. In: La revue de la BNU 2, 2010, pp. 24-47 [1] .
- Alfred Grimm: Spiegelberg, Wilhelm. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 24, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-428-11205-0 , pp. 682-684 ( digitized version ).
Web links
- Literature by and about Wilhelm Spiegelberg in the catalog of the German National Library
- Works by and about Wilhelm Spiegelberg in the German Digital Library
- Examples from the Heidelberg papyrus collection
- Digitized essays on a hieratic ostracon
- Spiegelberg books in the Internet Archive - online
Individual evidence
Johannes Dümichen (1872-1894) | Wilhelm Spiegelberg (1899–1918) | Pierre Montet (1919–1954) | Jean Leclant (1954–1964) | Philippe Derchain (1964–1968) | Jacques Parlebas (1968–1995) | Nathalie Baum (1995–1997) | Claude Traunecker (1997-2007) | Frédéric Colin (since 2007)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Spiegelberg, Wilhelm |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German Egyptologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 25, 1870 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Hanover |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 23, 1930 |
| Place of death | Munich |