Athanasios Rhousopoulos

Athanasios Sergiou Rhousopoulos ( ) (1823¹ – ) was a Greek archaeologist, antiquities dealer and university professor. He has been described as "the most important Greek collector and dealer between the 1860s and 1890s", and as "a key figure in the early days of archaeology in Greece." Born in 1823 in a region of northern Greece under the Ottoman Empire, Rhousopoulos was educated in Constantinople and Athens before receiving financial support from the antiquarian and philanthropist Konstantinos Bellios to pursue formal archaeological training in Germany. In 1853, he returned to Greece to work as a teacher, before being appointed to a post at the University of Athens in 1855. He wrote and translated numerous educational works concerning Greek history, culture and archaeology. Rhousopoulos played a significant role in the foundation of the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, and was a prominent member of the Archaeological Society of Athens, itself an important fixture in Greek archaeology during his lifetime. He excavated in Athens's Theatre of Dionysus as well as in the Kerameikos, where his 1863 discovery of the Grave Stele of Dexileos helped to confirm that the site was that of Athens's ancient cemetery.…

Athanasios Sergiou Rhousopoulos ( ) (1823 – ) was a Greek archaeologist, antiquities dealer and university professor. He has been described as "the most important Greek collector and dealer between the 1860s and 1890s", and as "a key figure in the early days of archaeology in Greece." Born in 1823 in a region of northern Greece under the Ottoman Empire, Rhousopoulos was educated in Constantinople and Athens before receiving financial support from the antiquarian and philanthropist Konstantinos Bellios to pursue formal archaeological training in Germany. In 1853, he returned to Greece to work as a teacher, before being appointed to a post at the University of Athens in 1855. He wrote and translated numerous educational works concerning Greek history, culture and archaeology. Rhousopoulos played a significant role in the foundation of the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, and was a prominent member of the Archaeological Society of Athens, itself an important fixture in Greek archaeology during his lifetime. He excavated in Athens's Theatre of Dionysus as well as in the Kerameikos, where his 1863 discovery of the Grave Stele of Dexileos helped to confirm that the site was that of Athens's ancient cemetery. He attracted controversy in the early 1870s for his criticism of the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, and of Schliemann's claim to have found artefacts from the Trojan War at the site of Hisarlik. Rhousopoulos was renowned for his collection of ancient artefacts, particularly coins, which was considered among the most impressive private collections in Greece. He was also a prominent dealer of antiquities, trading regularly with collectors, museums and society figures from around the world, and heavily involved in the illegal excavation and trafficking of ancient artefacts. From 1865, his activities came to increasing public and official attention, particularly that of the Ephor General, Panagiotis Efstratiadis; Rhousopoulos was fined after his illegal sale of the Aineta aryballos to the British Museum, and expelled from the Archaeological Society. Dismissed from his academic post in 1884 for reasons that remain unclear, Rhousopoulos died in 1898¹. He made significant contributions to Greek epigraphy, and was a major source of artefacts for several of the world's largest museums. In the twenty-first century, study of his extensive correspondence, particularly with the British scholars George Rolleston and Arthur Evans, has provided important evidence for the practice of archaeology and antiquities trading in nineteenth-century Greece. ==Early life and education== Athanasios Sergiou Rhousopoulos was born in 1823, in the village of Vogatsiko, near Kastoria in the northern Greek region of Macedonia, then part of the Ottoman Empire. He received his early education in Constantinople and Athens. In 1846, Konstantinos Bellios, a wealthy Greek merchant and antiquarian then living in Vienna, funded Rhousopoulos to attend Leipzig University and the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. He studied Greek literature and archaeology, before moving to the University of Göttingen, which awarded him a doctorate in 1852. Rhousopoulos wrote his thesis, entitled (On Zalmoxis, According to the Authority of the Ancients), in Ancient Greek. It was the first doctoral dissertation ever written on Zalmoxis, a Thracian deity mentioned by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. ==Academic career== In 1853, Rhousopoulos returned to Greece. From 1855 until 1858, he worked as a teacher in the First Gymnasium (secondary school) of Patras, in the northern Peloponnese. During his time in Patras, he translated the Danish philologist Handbook of Greek Antiquity ( ) into Greek for use as a school textbook. He also taught Greek for twenty-four years at the Rizarios Ecclesiastical School of Athens, and spent four years teaching ancient Greek civilisation at the Athens Polytechnic. In 1855, he was appointed to a temporary professorship of Greek at the University of Athens. In the same year, he published Manual of Greek Archaeology, a textbook which has been situated within the early-nineteenth-century trend for archaeological works relying primarily on literary sources rather than material culture to reconstruct the past. In 1857, he constructed a house for himself on Lycabettus Street in central Athens, excavating in the process three hundred ancient tombs on the site. His professorship was made permanent in 1860. The Archaeological Society of Athens, a learned society founded in 1837¹, had significant responsibility for archaeological work and heritage management in Greece throughout the 19th century. It had stagnated and all but disbanded between April 1854¹ and 1858, under pressure from its own financial troubles and a cholera outbreak that had killed its president, Georgios Gennadios. The society reformed in 1858: in 1859, Rhousopoulos was elected to its governing council, as the only member of the council with a background in archaeology rather than philology. In 1862, the society re-established the Archaeological Journal ( ), which published news of excavations and of the activities of the society and of the Greek Archaeological Service. Rhousopoulos was the head of publications for its first twelve issues. His eleven articles in the Journal focused primarily on Greek literature and culture, with only a few on archaeology. During the 1860s and 1870s, he was involved in the foundation of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, which eventually opened in 1893. In 1864, he was selected by the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs to serve on a committee to identify a suitable location for what became the National Archaeological Museum, which included prominent archaeological figures such as Panagiotis Efstratiadis, Stefanos Koumanoudis and Alexandros Rizos Rangavis. Rhousopoulos worked on categorising the materials transferred to the new museum from other institutions around Greece. Rhousopoulos's discovery in the spring of 1863 of the Grave Stele of Dexileos, alongside the contemporary excavation of the nearby funerary enclosure of Agathon, helped to identify the location of the ancient Athenian cemetery known as the Kerameikos. In 1866, excavations conducted by Rhousopoulos and his fellow archaeologist Petros Pervanoglou near the Theatre of Dionysus on the slopes of the Acropolis of Athens uncovered a marble sphere, approximately in circumference, inscribed with images of the god Helios and magical inscriptions. In 1868, Rhousopoulos was moved from his professorship in Greek to one in archaeology at the University of Athens. He was unusual among Athens's early archaeological professors for not having worked for the Greek Archaeological Service. On , Rhousopoulos was dismissed from his post. The reasons for his dismissal are uncertain: the Greek newspaper ( ) reported that he had left his post "on account of old age". The archaeologist and archaeological historian Yannis Galanakis has, however, suggested that Rhousopoulos was more likely dismissed on grounds of ill health, given that his age of 61 was relatively young, though little information about his health is available. ===Relationship with Heinrich Schliemann=== Rhousopoulos has been described as "a particularly vehement critic" of Heinrich Schliemann, the German archaeologist who excavated the site of Hisarlik (Troy) in various phases between 1871 and 1890. On , the German newspaper published a report of a conversation between Rhousopoulos and a number of his friends while he had been visiting Hannover. The newspaper reported the comment that the so-called Treasure of Priam, which Schliemann had excavated in May of that year, was "undoubtedly one of the most important [finds] of its kind", but that the period to which it belonged was uncertain; separately, the article quoted the judgement that Schliemann's find had "self-evidently nothing to do with the Treasure of Priam." Although it was unclear from the 's report which, if any, of these remarks had been made by Rhousopoulos himself, as opposed to his conversation partners, the report attracted a bitter response from W. Gosrau, the court chaplain of George I of Greece, who accused Rhousopoulos of having "driven the learned gentlemen wild" out of "bread-envy" ( ). In November, the , a rival newspaper of the , defended Rhousopoulos, pointing out that the alleged remarks could not be securely attributed to him, and accusing Gosrau of "a complete lack of tact" and "unwarranted arrogance." During his first informal exhibition of the finds from Troy at his house on Mouson Street in Athens in 1873, Schliemann invited all of Athens to visit, so that they could, in his words, "convince themselves with their own eyes of the atrocious calumnies" of Rhousopoulos, to whom he referred as "that foul fiend." Modern scholarship considers Schliemann's 'Treasure of Priam' to date to the Early Bronze Age ( ), several centuries earlier than the putative date of the mythical Priam's reign as king of Troy ( ). In 1879, Rhousopoulos examined a key that Schliemann had found at Troy, writing him what Schliemann described as "a valuable note" on its design and the symbolism of its decoration. ==Personal life and family== Rhousopoulos married the German Louisa Murray, whom he had met while a student at Göttingen. Murray's family were of Scottish descent and may have migrated to Germany around the time of the 1707 Acts of Union between Scotland and England. They had nine children. One of their daughters died in 1897¹; they had four other daughters – Agnes, Sophia, Bertha and Martha – and four sons: , Asterios, Roussos and Petros. According to Galanakis and Nowak-Kemp, Murray likely assisted Rhousopoulos in writing letters in English, which he did only rarely. Othon, born in 1856¹, became a chemist at the National Archaeological Museum, and has been credited as one of the most important figures in the early history of archaeological conservation. Roussos, meanwhile, was born in 1854 and became the Modern Greek tutor of Empress Elisabeth of Austria; he visited Corfu with her in 1889. In March 1891, Elisabeth appointed him as Professor of Greek Language at the Orientalischen Handelsakademie in Budapest, and he later became Professor of Greek at the University of Budapest, serving until the end of the First World War and dying in 1954. After his death, Rhousopoulos became the father-in-law of the German classical archaeologist Ernst Pfuhl, who married Sophia Rhousopoulos in 1904. The two met while Pfuhl was excavating on the Cycladic island of Thera. Sophia may also have sent impressions of some Cretan seal-stones to Arthur Evans, who received impressions of examples in her father's collection after Rhousopoulos's death. Rhousopoulos was known to be cosmopolitan, multilingual and well-connected in European society, particularly in German-speaking countries. Stefanos Koumanoudis, his contemporary in the Archaeological Society of Athens, and fellow professor (of Latin) at the University of Athens, described Rhousopoulos in 1846 as "antiquities-mad" ( ). Rhousopoulos defended his sale of Greek antiquities as a way of protecting Greek heritage and promoting its standing abroad – a view contested by the Archaeological Society and by Koumanoudis, who co-authored a pamphlet in 1872 with Philippos Ioannou, the society's president, calling on Greeks to use their "intelligence and patriotism" by refraining from looting or exporting antiquities. ==Footnotes== ===Explanatory notes=== ===References=== ==Sources==

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1360295025 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.