Max van Berchem, un orientaliste.

• Author: Michaudel, Benjamin

Max van Berchem, un orientaliste. By CHARLES GENEQUAND. Geneva: LIBRARIE DROZ, 2021. Pp. 208, illus. $42 (paper); $33.60 (ebook).

As hinted by its title, Charles Genequand's book is both a tribute to an eminent scientist, a pioneer of Islamic epigraphy and archaeology, and a shedding of light onto the milieu of research into the Near and Middle East during the golden age of orientalism, from the middle of the nineteenth century until the dawn of the First World War. From this perspective, the author has examined the very rich correspondence of the Swiss scholar with his close relations and with the numerous European and Eastern collaborators on his life's work, the monumental Corpus inscriptiomim arabicarum.

The major stages of Max van Berchem's life and career, deciphered through his writings, immerse the reader in a demystified Orient, beyond the distorting prism of colonialism and the political and military blinders provided by a paternalistic Europe in the nineteenth century. The first stage, marked by academic training and his first trips to the Near East in the 1880s, reveals a young man keen on history and archaeology, and willing "to do something, to work, to manage" (p. 19), who discovered a passion for Arabic while studying Semitic languages in Germany. There he met Eduard Sachau, a specialist in Syriac, Eastern Christians, and al-BIrum, who helped him complete his doctoral thesis in 1886. At the end of that same year, his first trip to Egypt, dedicated to the study of Arabic language and to the discovery of monuments, aroused his interest in epigraphy, even if, as Charles Genequand points out, "At the beginning, it was the buildings that interested him [...] The inscriptions [...] (only occuring) at a later stage and for the sake of completeness" (p. 44). Van Berchem then began a career devoted mainly to the collection, study, and, above all, publication of Arabic inscriptions from Syria and Egypt, which were initially ignored by his colleague orientalists, who were focused on the large number of Arabic manuscripts held in the libraries of the Middle East.

The second stage, from 1888 to 1894, heralds the genesis of the future Corpus inscriptionum arabicarum. After developing a strict methodology for the survey and analysis of epigraphic inscriptions, van Berchem continued surveying the inscriptions of Cairo in December 1888, and then, from 1892 to 1894, moved on to those throughout Egypt and southern Syria, including the regions...