Joseph Orbeli

Joseph Orbeli (Armenian: Հովսեփ Աբգարի Օրբելի, Hovsep Abgari Orbeli; Russian: Иосиф Абгарович Орбели, Iosif Abgarovich Orbeli; 20 March (O.S. 8 March) 1887 – 2 February 1961) was a renowned Soviet orientalist and academician, who specialized in medieval history of Southern Caucasus and administered the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad from 1934 to 1951. Of Armenian descent, he was the founder and first president of the Armenian Academy of Sciences (1943–47).

Biography

Early life and education

Born into a medieval noble family in Kutaisi, Russian Georgia in 1887, Joseph Orbeli completed his secondary education at a classical gymnasium in Tiflis. In 1904, he was accepted to St. Petersburg University. He studied history and philology (with a particular emphasis in Latin and Greek) and graduated from the university in 1911. During his student years, Orbeli accompanied his professor, Nicholas Marr, to Russian Armenia, where he took part in excavations of the ruins of the medieval Armenian capital of Ani. Marr pushed his pupil to fully immerse himself in the fields of archaeology, literature, lithography and linguistics; otherwise, Marr reasoned, he would find himself unprepared in his research and his studies.