Aber die Zeit fürchtet die Pyramiden

In Europe, the bible was long used to determine the age of human civilization, supplemented by accounts written by the historians of classical antiquity. The early modern development of the natural sciences called supposed certainties into question. The classical disciplines were assigned a decisive role in this conflict. This volume presents these developments, some of them unexpected

Flinders Petrie, the Travelling Salesman Problem, and the Beginning of Mathematical Modeling in Archaeology

Abstract. This article describes one of the first attempts to use mathematical modeling and optimization in archaeology. William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942, eminent British archaeologist, excavating a large graveyard at Naqada in Upper Egypt suggested in his article "Sequences in Prehistoric Remains" [17] to employ a "distance function" to describe the "closeness of graves in time". Petrie's grave distance is known today as Hamming metric, based on which he proposed to establish the chronology of the graves, i.e., the correct sequence of points in time when the graves were built (briefly called seriation). He achieved this by solving a graph theoretic problem which is called weighted Hamiltonian path problem today and is, of course, equivalent to the symmetric travelling salesman problem. This paper briefly sketches a few aspects of Petrie's biographical background and evaluates the significance of seriation. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification: 01A55, 05-03, 90-03, 90C2

0289 The Patronage of Berlin’s Egyptian Museum by German-Jewish Press Tycoon Rudolf Mosse (1843–1920) and the Sequestration of His Art Collection during the "Third Reich"

The publishing tycoon Rudolf Mosse (1843–1920) donated over 700 objects to the Egyptian Museum in Berlin between 1892 and 1894, among them the Green Head from a royal statue of Amasis (ÄM 11864). Most had been acquired on the antiquities market by Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch (1827–1894) during his journey to Egypt in 1891–1892, which was financed by Mosse. Leaving aside postcolonial discourse regarding the appropriation of ancient Egyptian artifacts by European travelers and scholars, this case study highlights another important and long-neglected aspect of the early history of German Egyptology: patronage or private support provided by Jewish entrepreneurs. Only recently a wider public was reminded of the engagement of James Simon (1851–1932), the most significant sponsor of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society), whose gifts to the Egyptian Museum in Berlin included the painted bust of Queen Nefertiti. This article—which is based on the findings of a multi-author volume published jointly by the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies in Potsdam and the Egyptian Museum in Berlin—discusses the prehistory of the seizure and sale of Mosse’s private art collection in 1934, including Egyptian antiquities, and the attempted damnatio memoriae of him. The goal is to open a discussion with a broader, more complex approach, employing strategies of provenance research, to document the efforts and achievements of Jewish patrons of the arts and thus avoid their reduction to victims