Ede Mahler, the founder of Hungarian Egyptology and Assyriology
MúzeumCafé 19.
Ede Mahler was appointed to a university professorship one hundred years ago. Mahler (1857-1945) while studying in Vienna he discovered the ancient Orient. He returned to Budapest in 1896, his textbook Essentials of Egyptian appeared in 1899. His first opportunity for a study tour to Egypt only came in 1910, although from 1902 he was engaged with cataloguing Egyptian items in Hungarian museums. He was still at the National Museum when in 1907 the finds of the Egyptian excavations financed by Fülöp Back arrived. The establishment of the Department of Ancient History of Eastern Peoples in 1910 lagged behind similar developments in Universities (Berlin 1846, Göttingen 1868, Heidelberg 1872, Leipzig 1875 London 1892, Oxford 1901, Liverpool 1906). Mahler retired in 1928 at the age of 70, though he continued to give lectures. In 1937 “friends, admirers and students” issued a memorial volume to mark his 80th birthday and colleagues in London, Paris, Rome, Florence and Jerusalem sent greetings. In the following year he finally withdrew, his university lectures falling to two of his disciples. 1939 saw the opening in the Fine Arts Museum of its Egyptian Collection, which Mahler had been urging for decades. The collection was put together by his followers Aladár Dobrovits and Vilmos Wessetzky. Mahler didn’t experience many other happy events. During the war he retreated to his home to work. He was saved from deportation, but in the last days of the war his apartment was hit by a bomb and it seemed then that his manuscripts were completely destroyed. However, the good news is that this year they unexpectedly appeared abroad intact. The scholar who had founded Egyptology and Assyriology in Hungary passed away in the summer of 1945.