Vladimir Golenischeff’s Vision of the Egyptian Language in the Light of His Archival Evidence

Abstract

The article assesses the scholarly heritage of the founder of the Russian Egyptology Vladimir Golenischeff reflecting his views on the structure and the origin of the Egyptian language. It highlights a few of his archive documents: the structure of the fund in Centre Wladimir Golénischeff (Paris) containing the manuscripts of his treatise on the Egyptian syntax and a paper belonging to it; his letters to the French Egyptologists Étienne Drioton and Gustave Lefebvre of 17 June 1922 and 14 September 1936; fragments of other letters. The contents of these papers is compared to his publications. The points of Golenischeff’s polemics with the Berlin school of Egyptian philology were defined with his reluctance to accept the notion of Pseudopartizip as an analogy of the Semitic perfective and its anteriority to the suffix conjugation, the participial nature of the latter’s stem, the triliterality of Egyptian verbal roots. However, Golenischeff’s position was obviously backed by his own scholarly experience accumulated with years and not with an urge to oppose the Berlin school. This opposition came to be more active at the end of World War I, when the scholar laid the responsibility for the catastrophe in Russia on Germans. The scholar’s views largely depended on his vision of the origin of the Egyptian language: he declined his immediate connection to the Semitic languages and favoured their origin of a common ancestor tongue. A comparison of this vision to the concept of the Afroasiatic languages forwarded in 1960s by Igor Diakonoff shows that Golenischeff was well ahead of his time.