BRUGSCH

While relatively youthful French twins Marc and Luc Gabolde are recognized as today's Egyptological brother-act, a pair of historical German siblings who each enjoyed long careers caretaking the wisdom and treasures of ancient Egypt Heinrich Brugsch and his somewhat-younger brother, Émile are better known, their wide-ranging individual contributions to the discipline of Egyptology taking place over more than six decades. Yet today even some Egyptologists are unclear as to which brother did what (Heinrich often being confused for Émile ), and it is not certain how they came to be tagged the good Brugsch and the bad Brugsch, and which was which.

Heinrich Ferdinand Karl B. was born in Berlin on February 18, 1827, the son of Ernest Wilhelm Brugsch and his wife Dorothea Schramm. As a boy he visited the Berlin Museum and became fascinated with its Egyptian artifacts. His interest in Egypt was fostered by the Museum s curator of the Egyptian collection, Guiseppe Passalacqua (1797- 1865). Young Brugsch quickly evidenced a remarkable facility for Demotic, and by the age of sixteen he had begun putting together a grammar, whichhe published four years later as Scriptura Aegyptiorum demotica ex papyris et inscriptionibus explanata. That same year, 1848, he began studies at the University of Berlin, obtaining in due course his doctorate. He also studied in Paris and visited the Egyptian collections of the museums of Europe. The government of Prussia sent him to Egypt in 1853, and there he soon formed a lasting friendship with French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette (1821-1881), six years his senior. He worked with him at Sakkara over the next four years, helping translate inscriptions in the Serapeum.

Heinrich traveled to Persia on a diplomatic mission in 1860, later serving there as acting Prussian ambassador, after which he was appointed his country s consul in Cairo in 1864. Brugsch was offered a post at the Collége de France (Paris), which he turned down to accept a professorship in Egyptology at the University of Göttingen in 1867. In 1870 he was invited back to Egypt by the Khedive and made director of the School of Egyptology in Cairo, founded by the Egyptian ruler, who awarded the Prussian the honorary title of Bey. Heinrich continued directing the institution until its closure in 1879. The Egyptian government made him a Pasha in 1881. The last decade of his life was spent mostly in Germany, although he paid occasional visits to Egypt.

Heinrich Brugsch s contributions to Egyptology were so wide-reaching that many of his contemporaries classed him with Champollion, Lepsius, etc., as one of the founding figures of the discipline. His greatest strength, however, was the ancient Egyptian language, and he was certainly a pioneer in the study of Demotic. Brugsch recognized the Semitic side of Egyptian grammar, thus enabling a far more comprehensive and systematic understanding of hieroglyphs. He founded the journal Zeitschrift für Aegyptische Sprache (ZÄS) in 1863 (making it the oldest Egyptological publication still in existence today), and he contributed some 115 articles and items to it during the next three decades. His body of published work amounts to many volumes and thousands of pages, covering a broad range of topics: hieroglyphic and demotic scripts and texts, the Egyptian calendar, mythology, historical biography and geography, and architecture.

Heinrich Brugsch married twice, Pauline Harcke in 1851 and Antonie Vestädnig in 1868. He died in Charlottenburg on September 9, 1894.

His brother's junior by fifteen years, Émile Charles Albert Brugsch was born in Berlin on February 24, 1842. He tried his hand at a variety of careers before going to Egypt at age twenty-eight in 1870, to assist Heinrich in the operation of the School of Egyptology, which he continued doing until its closing nine years later. He then became associated with Mariette, who made Émile an assistant conservator at the Boulak Museum, a position which he held under a series of directors (Maspero, Grébaut, De Morgan, Loret and Maspero again) and at the new Egyptian Museum in Cairo, over the next forty-three years, until his retirement on January 1, 1914, at the age of seventy-two.

Like his brother, Émile was made successively Bey and Pasha by the Egyptian government for his service at the Boulak and Cairo museums. His involvement in Egyptology was more practical and hands-on than his brother's, and Émile's only effort at scholarship per se was his 1887 compilation of cartouches published with Urbain Bouriant (1849- 1903), Le Livre des rois, contenant la liste chronologique des rois, reines, princes, princesses et personnages importants de l Égypte depuis Ménès jusqu a Nectanebo II.

Émile Brugsch's chief claim to fame came about in mid-1881, quite by the accident of his superior Gaston Maspero's absence in France when word came from Luxor that a cache of royal mummies had been revealed to exist there. With two other Boulak Museum assistants, Brugsch went straightaway to the site, claimed it for the Antiquities Service and proceeded to have the cache-tomb hurriedly cleared of its some forty royal and anonymous coffined mummies, during forty-eight hours over a six-day period. The rescued royalty were loaded on board the Museum steamer and taken to Cairo and Boulak. Impatient awaiting Maspero s return to Egypt, Brugsch unwrapped the mummy of Thutmose III, for which he received the Frenchman s upbraiding later.

A photographer, Émile took the first pictures of the royal mummies, published by Maspero as the plates to his 1881 La Trouvaille de Deir-el- Bahari. Brugsch later rephotographed these same individuals for G. Elliot Smith's Catalogue Génèral 1912 volume, The Royal Mummies. He likewise was responsible for many of the photographic plates illustrating other early volumes of the Museum's Catalogue.

Émile Brugsch retired to Nice, dying there on January 14, 1930.

DCF

BACK TO KMT CONTENTS FALL 1996