Today the State Hermitage Museum presents an exhibition dedicated to the 150th anniversary of academician Nikolai Petrovich Likhachev

State Hermitage Museum, April 20 - July 22, 2012
St. Petersburg, Winter Palace, the Halls of Byzantium and the Middle East

Today the State Hermitage Museum presents "There have only the letters ..." dedicated to the 150th anniversary of academician Nikolai Petrovich Likhachev (1862-1936). His name is well known to all specialists humanities. World-class scientist: Paleography and epigrapher, a prominent expert on Diplomatique, codicology, Textual and sphragistics, bibliophile and connoisseur of icons, it nevertheless was a major collector.

unique collection Likhachev was formed in the first decades of the twentieth century and in 1925 received the official name of the Museum of paleography. The main idea of ​​the museum's founder was the following: show-specific sites of development of writing from ancient times to the beginning of XX century. The museum funds include more than 80,000 items. In 1930, Likhachev was arrested, his museum a few years later, after the death of the scientist, disbanded. Proceedings of the collection were transferred to various agencies, including the Hermitage, where now are stored.

Paying tribute to a remarkable scientist, it was decided to hold an exhibition, to unite, at least temporarily, in a single exposure, the most interesting and representative monuments of the collection Likhachev. The main objective of the exhibition - to trace the main stages in the development of writing, to provide different types of letters to the soft and hard materials, as well as to show the different types of documents: formal, church, private.

The exhibition includes 460 items. Among them: the cuneiform tablets of Mesopotamia, Ancient inscriptions on a stone, monuments of ancient Greece and Rome, papyri, Byzantine, Old Russian, Syrian, Western medieval manuscripts and letters, Arabic tombstones, flying editions Russia and Western Europe, documents, Iran and Turkey XV - XIX Centuries , stamps, coins, autographs, early printed books, and more. All material is distributed into four large sections: "Origins of writing. Writings of the Ancient World, "" Writing and the documents of the Middle Ages and Renaissance "," Documents of modern times in Russia and Europe "," Inscriptions of the medieval and the new East. " Timelines of the exhibition: line IV /beginning of III millennium BC. Oe. - The beginning of the twentieth century, ie, almost five thousand years. The exhibition is supplemented memorial section, including documents from the vast personal archive of a scientist.

prepared for the exhibition catalog, which includes a description with extensive commentary of all the exhibits, introductory articles about the life and work of NP Likhachev , its history and the collecting activities of the Museum of palaeography, and, in the form of an application - prosopographic guide those antiquarians, collectors and scholars, with whom he was acquainted, or was in a business relationship Likhachev.

Exhibition and catalog prepared by staff of the State Hermitage Museum in conjunction with the St. Petersburg Institute of History of Sciences, St. Petersburg branch of the Archives of Sciences, Institute of Oriental Manuscripts Library and the Academy of Sciences. Exhibition curator - Elena Stepanova, a leading researcher in the Department east of the Hermitage.

Sources : hermitagemuseum.org , nasledie. enip.ras.ru