Political vs intellectual? Russia’s late Imperial archaeology and the Russian Cause
Journal: Middle Eastern Studies
Year: 2023

AbstractDrawing on the writings of the founding representatives of late Imperial Russia’s Oriental studies, and documents from Russian archives, this article first traces Professor Nikolay Veselovsky’s (1848-1918) formative origins as an influential historian and archaeologist of the East on the national level. He came to be, as pointed out by Vasily Barthold (1869-1930), one of those scholars ferociously ‘counteracting the influence of the West through reliance on the study of the Orient’. The