Владимир Семенович Голенищев и открытие гробницы гермопольского жреца Петосириса в Туна эль-Гебель в 1919–1920 гг

Шаги/Steps. 2021. Т. 7. № 4. С. 54–79.

Ladynin I. A.

The article deals with the correspondence between the outstanding Russian Egyptologist V. S. Golenischeff and his British and Franch colleagues A. H. Gardiner and G. Lefebvre. The letters under consideration (archives of the Griffith Institute at Oxford and the Archives of Vladimir Golenischeff at Paris) discussed the discovery of the tomb of the Hermopolitan priest Petosiris at Tuna el-Gebel in 1919–1920. Golenischeff visited the site on the invitation of Levebvre, who carried out the research, and in due course expressed his view on the date of the monuments and on its texts. Having first attributed the tomb of Petosiris to the start of the Roman time, he shared in due course the view of Lefebvre that the most important text of the tomb (inscription 81) describes the Second Persian Domination (343–332 B.C.) and, thus, the tomb should be dated to the early Hellenistic time. Golenischeff’s letters show that his paramount interest was, expectedly, the hieroglyphic writings and the language of the tomb’s texts; as for their historical interpretation and the respective dating of the monument, he easily gave up his initial view on it taking the hypothesis of Lefebvre as more consistent. This case allows observing that despite his interest in texts Golenischeff considered their features rather as an instrument to better motivate a hypothesis on the dating of the monument that had to be primarily founded on its style and on the suppositions concerning its most probable historical context.

 

Keywords: Древний Египет, history of science, Ancient Egypt, археология, archaeology, русская египтология, russian egyptology, archaeology of the Ancient Near East, археология древнего Ближнего Востока, история науки