Boris Aleksandrovich Turaev: a life dedicated to the history of Egypt
Turaev, Boris Aleksandrovich, associate professor. Illustration from the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary
"[...] Now, at the end of the 20th century, thousands of people in our country have once again lost faith in the fact that story — this is science. The overnight transformation of former diehard Marxists into rabid democrats, the publication of the writings of Fomenko and Postnikov, Suvorov (Rezun) and Bushkov have once again forced our compatriots to consider history as politics thrown back into the past. [...] »
— Doctor of Philological Sciences, Candidate of Historical Sciences, Professor Vassoevich A. L.
— Doctor of Philological Sciences, Candidate of Historical Sciences, Professor Vassoevich A. L.
People and history. One of those people who laid a solid foundation for Russian Egyptology was B.A. Turaev, who left behind many students and followers, and works whose value has hardly diminished over time. He was born in 1868 into a noble family living in the Minsk province. He studied, of course, at the gymnasium in the city of Vilno, but the funny thing is that he did not shine with academic success, although he managed to reap the laurels of the best student in the preparatory and second grades. But then his interest in studying dropped so much that he even began to get twos in exams. True, he always got an "A" in history, geography and the Law of God. What a pity that when I was at school, I did not know this, otherwise I would have shoved his biography in my mathematician's face and said that I had this man's life as a model. Ha, that would have made him cringe, by God! In general, how great it is that great people did not always get straight A's in school! I think it's inspiring, don't you?
The fact that Turaev began to take an interest in antiquity in high school is important. This again goes to show how important it is to incite a child to something from childhood. And it also happened that his grandmother once took him to the Berlin Museum, and there he saw ancient Egyptian monuments. And... the same thing happened to him as happened to J.-F. Champollion, who as a boy saw Foucault's collection of antiquities, which he brought back from Napoleon's Egyptian campaign. And of course, he also saw the Egyptian collection of the Museum of Antiquities at the Villeneuve Public Library.
And it is not surprising that after the gymnasium Turaev, having graduated from the Historical and Philological Faculty of St. Petersburg University, was left there to prepare for the title of professor. And not just left, but sent abroad at government expense to listen to lectures by Adolf Erman, Eberhard Schrader and Gaston Maspero – the leading historians of that time. He also studied collections in museums in Berlin, Paris, London and a number of Italian cities (1893-1895). In general, the evil tsarist regime in no way gave talented people of Russia the opportunity to advance and did not let them go anywhere.
Although Turaev himself was very dissatisfied with the attitude of the tsarist government towards history and wrote the following about this:
“It must be acknowledged that almost nothing has been done in our country to raise interest in the great cultures of antiquity. While the English, the French, and after them the Germans, Italians and Americans did not hesitate to spend any effort, energy and material resources for the archaeological study of the countries where the most ancient human civilizations were created, [...] while Western and transatlantic museums were filled with monuments of Egypt and Western Asia, providing material for scientists and educational resources for society, when both governments and private organizations understood the importance of studying the East and supported it in every possible way, and extensive scientific and popular literature went to meet both these undertakings and the interest of society that they aroused, in our country, lying closest to the East both territorially, historically and culturally, the study of the East, especially the ancient one, was thought about least of all - there were no departments, no original literature, and therefore for a long time there was no noticeable interest in this field of knowledge.”
Since 1896, B. A. Turaev began to teach a course in Egyptology at the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University. And then the first department of the history of the ancient East in Russia was even created for him. Incidentally, it remained the only one, because there were simply no other scientists of such level in Russia at that time.
However, the basis of his knowledge was indeed very deep. His notes of the lectures he attended in Berlin have been preserved: "Assyro-Babylonian Antiquities" and "Explanations of Assyro-Babylonian Inscriptions" by Schrader, "History of Babylonia and Assyria" by Lehmann, "Introduction to Mexican Archaeology" by Zehler, "New Egyptian Grammar" by Erman, "Ancient Egyptian Archaeology" and "Coptic Phonetics and Dialects" by Steindorff. That is, they were read by specialists who had deeply penetrated these topics, who themselves dug and studied these antiquities, translated the texts they found, in a word, he studied with people who were exceptionally knowledgeable, "scholars with a capital letter".
Turaev’s main work, the monumental “History of the Ancient East,” was also connected with his work as a teacher and “grew” out of a course of lectures he gave on the history of the ancient East (he began giving them in 1896 as a private lecturer). This work was first published by the student publishing committee (that’s what it was like under the damned tsarism!) in 1911, and then it was reissued in an expanded form and with illustrations in 1913. The last edition of this book, published in 1916, was awarded the gold medal of the Russian Archaeological Society.
Very quickly, a circle of students formed around Turaev. Moreover, many of them - most likely on his advice and patronage - went to Berlin for internships. It is interesting that the first among them, the first was N. D. Flittner (1879-1957), who graduated from the Higher Women's Courses in Moscow, and then studied with Turaev in St. Petersburg in 1905-1909. After which she attended several summer semesters in Berlin with A. Erman, E. Meyer and G. Schaefer (1909, 1912-1914). And it turned out that she became the first woman in Russia to study the ancient East, became a professor and from 1919 until the end of her life worked in the Department of the Ancient East of the Hermitage. Then another Muscovite, Vladimir Mikhailovich Vikentyev (1882–1960), who had been the keeper of the Eastern Collection at the Historical Museum since 1915, went to Germany. In 1922, he was sent abroad, moved to Egypt, and died there as a professor at Cairo University.
Under Soviet rule, Turaev did not become a banned author, although he was subjected to harsh criticism, primarily for his religiosity, and he was a deeply religious person (he was a psalm-reader at the Peter and Paul Church!) and actively participated in the life of our Orthodox Church. They wrote about him that he was “a consistent idealist in his worldview and a deeply religious person by conviction - he was very far from historical materialism. Moreover, much seemed unacceptable to him in the revolution.” They wrote, but... they could not help but reckon with his authority.
He was the first in Russia to engage in systematic study and publication of ancient Egyptian monuments from domestic museum collections in museums of the Russian Empire (in Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, Kazan and Odessa). In 1912, he became the custodian of the Egyptian antiquities collection at the Museum of Fine Arts (now the A.S. Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts) in Moscow. He assembled an excellent collection of Egyptian antiquities, which is now housed in the State Hermitage Museum.
Well, after the revolution, since 1918, he was an academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the Department of Historical Sciences and Philology (literature and history of Asian peoples), a professor in the Department of Liturgy at the Petrograd Theological Institute, a member of the board of the Church Society of United Orthodox Parishes of Petrograd and the Brotherhood of Saint Sophia, and since 1919 he headed the Department of Egyptology at Petrograd University. Turaev died of sarcoma and was buried in the Nikolskoye Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.
Turaev also wrote the book “Egyptian Literature” (1920) and the popular science essay “Ancient Egypt” (1922), which were published after his death. He left behind followers of his work, which is not always possible for both scientists and politicians, and, in particular, he became the mentor of a number of orientalists, including Vasily Vasilyevich Struve, the creator of the “five-member” formational approach adopted in Soviet Marxist historiography.
He was also an amazingly versatile researcher. In addition to Egyptology, he studied the history of Nubia and Aksum, medieval Ethiopia and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, as well as Semitology, Assyriology, Sumerology, Coptology, Hittology and Urartian studies. It is not without reason that Turaev, due to the breadth of his analysis and the depth of his encyclopedic knowledge, was often compared to James Henry Breasted, an American archaeologist and historian who also studied Egyptology and the influence of the civilizations of the Ancient Near East on the formation of Western and Orthodox civilization.
His works examined many important aspects of the history of the Ancient East (for example, he proposed the term "Fertile Crescent" that is generally accepted today). So, comparing them both, we can say that our Turaev, having fewer opportunities than the American Egyptologist, made a contribution to science that was no less, and even greater, than he did.
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