Vladimir Semyonovich Golenischeff and the discovery of the tomb of the Hermopolitan Priest Petosiris at Tuna el-Gebel in 1919-1920

Abstract

The article deals with the correspondence between the outstanding Russian Egyptologist V. S. Golenischeff and his British and French 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 Lefebvre, 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 later Lefebvre’s view 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, as expected, 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 and accepted Lefebvre’s hypothesis as more consistent. This case leads to the conclusion that, despite his interest in the texts of the tomb, Golenischeff considered their features rather as an instrument to better motivate a hypothesis on the dating that was primarily based on the tomb’s style and on the suppositions concerning its most probable historical context.