Vasily Bartold

Vasily Bartold
Vasily Vladimirovich Bartold (– 19 August 1930), who published in the West under his German baptism name, Wilhelm Barthold, was a Russian orientalist who specialized in the history of Islam and the Turkic peoples (Turkology).
Barthold was born in St. Petersburg to a Russianized German family. His career spanned the last decades of the Russian Empire and the first years of the Soviet Union.
Barthold's lectures at the University of Saint Petersburg were annually interrupted by extended field trips to Muslim countries. In the two volumes of his dissertation (Turkestan down to the Mongol Invasion, 1898-1900), he pointed out the many benefits the Muslim world derived from Mongol rule after the initial conquests. Barthold was the first to publish obscure information from the early Arab historians on the Kievan Rus'. He also edited several scholarly journals of Muslim studies, and contributed extensively to the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam. In 1913, he was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences. In February 1917 he was appointed to the Commission for the Study of the Tribal Composition of the Population of the Borderlands of Russia.
After the Russian Revolution, Barthold was appointed director of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, a post he held from 1918 to 1921. He wrote three authoritative monographs on the history of Islam, namely Islam (1918), Muslim Culture (1918) and The Muslim World (1922). He also contributed to the development of Cyrillic writing for the Muslim countries of Soviet Central Asia.
Most of his writings were translated to English, Arabic, and Persian. Barthold's collected works were reprinted in 9 volumes between 1963 and 1977, and while Soviet editors added footnotes deploring his 'bourgeois' attitudes, his prestige was such that the text was left uncensored, despite not conforming to a Marxist interpretation of history. Some of his works have been reprinted more recently in Moscow.
Works
«Туркестан в эпоху монгольского нашествия» (St. Petersburg: 1900)
Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion (London: Luzac & Co) 1928 (Trans. H. A. R. Gibb); online
«Улугбек и его время» Ulugh-Beg (Leyden: 1918)
"Ulug Beg und seine Zeit". In Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 21, No. 1, (Leipzig:Brockhaus) 1935, (Trans. Walther Hinz)
"Ulugh-Beg". In Four Studies on the History of Central Asia Vol. II (Leiden: E.J. Brill) 1958 (Trans. V. & T.Minorsky)
Mussulman Culture (Kolkata: University of Calcutta) translated from Russian by Hasan Shaheed Suhrawardy 1934.
«Тюрки. Двенадцать лекций по истории турецких народов Средней Азии» [The Turks : twelve lessons on the history of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia]
Zwölf Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Türken Mittelasiens (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1932/35 and 1962)
"A Short History of Turkestan" (1956). In Four Studies on the History of Central Asia Vol. I (Leiden: E.J. Brill) 1956 (Trans. V. & T.Minorsky)
An Historical Geography of Iran (Princeton: Princeton University Press) 1984 (translated by Svat Soucek; edited by C.E. Bosworth)
Собрание сочинений (Москва: Издательство Восточной литературы) 1963-77 9 Vols.—Complete works
Отчет о поездке в Среднюю Азию с научною целью (С.Пб.: Тип. Имп. Академии Наук) 1897
История культурной жизни Туркестана (Москва: Изд. Академии наук СССР) 1927
Работы по исторической географии (Москва: Изд. фирма «Восточная литература» РАН) 2002
Notes
References
1869 births
1930 deaths
Full Members of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1917–1925)
Full members of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences
Full Members of the USSR Academy of Sciences
Islam and politics
Khazar studies
Writers from Saint Petersburg
Anthropologists from the Russian Empire
Russian people of German descent
Historians from the Russian Empire
Orientalists from the Russian Empire
Soviet historians
20th-century Russian historians
Turkologists
Russian scientists