Spiegelberg, Wilhelm

Born into a Jewish family, his father was a banker; was the second of four children. He received his secondary education at the Second Lyceum of Hanover, where from childhood he showed interest in the sciences, especially in the history and culture of Ancient Egypt. Higher education received at the University of Strasbourg , where among his teachers were Johann Dumichen and Adolf Michaelis , in 1892 he defended his doctoral dissertation in Strasbourg; then continued his studies at the University of Berlin under Adolf Ehrman and Brugsch, in 1894 he was rehabilitated; by the end of the 19th century, he was recognized as a major specialist in demotic and hieratic texts; In addition to papyri, he was also interested in the administrative structure of the New Kingdom. In 1895-1899 he visited Egypt several times and took part in excavations in Thebes, where he collected materials for his great work on the history of the Theban necropolis and the working question in ancient Egypt. Since 1899, thanks to his trips to Egypt and successful purchases, which allowed him to form a large Egyptological collection, he took the place of Dumichen at the University of Strasbourg, where he taught as an extraordinary professor; in the same year he married, later became the father of three children.

Since 1900, he seriously studied the papyri and catalogs of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and, together with Francis Llewellyn Griffith, made a great contribution to the decoding of demotic writing and lexicography. From 1907 to 1918 he was an ordinary professor of Egyptology in Strasbourg. In early 1919, after Alsace and Lorraine, following the results of the Versailles Peace, were returned to France, he left Strasbourg and moved to the University of Heidelberg , where he received the position of professor emeritus. Since 1921, as part of a team of authors, he worked on the creation of the “Coptic Encyclopedia”. In 1919 he became a corresponding member of the Heidelberg Academy, in 1923 a non-permanent member. In the same 1923 he headed the Department of Egyptology at the University of Munich, where he also founded the Egyptological seminar. In 1924 he was elected a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. He died after an unsuccessful operation in 1930. He was engaged in science almost until the last days of his life; many of his works remained incomplete.

He was considered one of the best paleographers and experts on demotic documents, participated in the editions of the Egypt Exploration Fund, processing hieratic texts for him. In 1896, he was the first to read the name of Israel in Egyptian literature in the victorious inscription of the pharaoh Merenpt (reflected in his work “The Victory Anthem of Merneptah”). Main works: “Two essays on the history and topography of Theban necropolis” (“Zwei Beiträge zur Geschichte und Topographie des Thebanisch. Necropolis”) (1898); “Egyptian and Greek proper names of the times of the Roman Empire” ( “Aegyptische und Griechische Eigennamen aus Römischer Kaiserzeit” ); "Accounts of the era of Network I" ( "Die Rechnungen aus d. Zeit Seti I" ); The Demotic Papyrus from the Strasbourg Library ( Die demotischen Papyrus d. Strassburger Bibliothek ) (1900) and a number of other articles. The Chicago Demotic Dictionary is largely based on the work of Spiegelberg.

• Turaev B.A. Shpigelberg, Wilhelm // Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron : 86 volumes (82 volumes and 4 additional). - SPb. , 1890-1907.

• Spiegelberg, Wilhelm // NDB (German)
• Spiegelberg, Wilhelm // Nordisk Familjebok (Swedish)