Alexandre Piankoff was a world-renowned anthropologist and Egyptologist, who made significant progress in the field of translating religious texts. Born in 1897 in St Petersburg, Russia, Piankoff first got a taste for history when visiting the majestic State Hermitage Museum in his home city. Enthralled by the Egyptology section in particular, Piankoff studied Foreign Languages and Egyptian Philology at university, before his academic life was cut short by the First World War.
Thereafter Piankoff became a fervent academic, studying at Berlin, then the Sarbonne in 1924, then the University of Paris where he obtained a Phd. The Second World War saw Piankoff take the French side and he fought in Africa, where he ended up in Cairo. On the war’s conclusion he traveled back to Egypt, where he made several discoveries with the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology.
His work in Thebes, however, would prove the most fruitful, with some fantastic discoveries made in the tombs of Ramesses V and VI, and he helped with work at Tutankhamun’s glittering grave. It would be the translating of ancient Egyptian religious material for which Piankoff would be most revered, with books such as Mythological Papyri, The Wandering of the Soul and The Litany of Re. He is also highly revered in studies of the Book of the Dead. Alexandre Piankoff died in 1966.
