To the problem of a provenance of Wladimir Golenischeff’ collection: Acquisitions from antiquity dealers, local sellers and private collectors (based on archival materials)

Abstract

This paper deals with the analysis of the unpublished archival material kept in the Department of Ancient Orient at the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. It is the so-called fichiers — the index cads written by Golenischeff’ hand mostly in French. These index cards serve a very important source of the provenance of Egyptian monuments from Golenischeff collection. The value of this material is obvious as it comes from the first hands. However, we have few indications of the provenance comparing to the whole corpus of the fichiers, counting only 5 % from the 6000 items. It is worth noting that the last 600 index cards have been written by hand of Tatjana Borozdina, and she borrowed the information about the provenance from her teacher Boris Turaev, who in turn was informed by Golenischeff himself. In present article, we study the indications concerning the acquisitions from antiquity dealers in Egypt as well as from various private collectors in Europe and Russia. We also know that many local sellers such as Egyptian fellahin (peasants) served as antiquity dealers and sold the objects to the European collectors (as well as to the famous antiquity dealers). Golenischeff could contact with these local people without mediators as he had a command of Arabic, and was acquainted with the then antiquity market. Apart from this kind of information, the index cards contain the references to the acquisitions at the different auctions and individual purchases. Many names of indicated persons in cards, however, are still unknown to us.