Brooklyn Museum

NYU Institute
of Fine Arts

Wilbour Library
of Egyptology

B.V. Bothmer
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Many people have had great influence on my professional life. Teachers, fellow students and colleagues have affected my way of working within the fields of Egyptology and librarianship. Without the slightest hesitation, however, I must admit that the late Bernard Bothmer had the most profound influence on all aspects of what I do today professionally.

Mr. Bothmer began his own life in Germany in 1912. As a young scholar, he worked in the Egyptian collection in Berlin from 1932 to 1938, where he undoubtedly began to develop and refine his well-ordered methodologies for both research and work. The rise of Nazism drove him from Germany in 1939 and eventually, via a circuitous route shrouded in some mystery, he arrived in the United States and enlisted in the U.S. Army. He fought Nazism for the duration of the war, and remained fiercely anti-Nazi for the rest of his life, even refusing to allow books by known Nazis to enter the collection of the Wilbour Library of Egyptology.

Following his discharge from the army in 1946, he commenced, at age thirty-four, his American Egyptological career as an assistant in the Egyptian department of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The part of Mr. Bothmer's story that concerns me began a decade later, when in 1956 he became an assistant curator of ancient Egyptian art at the The Brooklyn Museum under John D. Cooney. It was during the following years that he established his reputation as the scholar of the art of the Late Period, and in 1960 he was responsible for organizing a seminal exhibition at Brooklyn, "Egyptian Sculpture of the Late Period."

Mr. Bothmer had begun to assemble the Corpus of Late Period sculpture in 1952; and, until his death forty-one years later, not a week, perhaps not even a day, went by when he did not either add to the Corpus, refer to it or refine it. In a way it is emblematic of his entire career. The Corpus contains photographs and documentation of every known piece of sculpture dating to Late Period Egypt and is a testament to Mr. Bothmer's untiring devotion to the project, which found him traveling to the most-remote collection, public or private, to locate yet another relevant work to add to the Corpus. The vast majority of the photographs in the Corpus were taken by Mr. Bothmer, and reflect his photographic skills, especially in regards to views and lighting. When he photographed a sculpture, he also took detailed measurements and any other vital statistics which would serve to solidly identify the object. The Corpus files themselves are meticulously arranged and cross-referenced. In short, the Corpus of Late Egyptian Sculpture is a grand monument of scholarship, attention to detail and meticulousness, all qualities of Mr. Bothmer himself; and he demanded no less from his students and Egyptological colleagues.

I personally first encountered Bernard Bothmer in 1968, when I was fresh out of high school and anxious to enter the field of Egyptology. Having grown up in Brooklyn, I was very familiar with the Egyptian collection of the Brooklyn Museum, and even knew of the Wilbour Library, although I had never dared use it. That summer after graduation, I volunteered in the Library and a year later was employed by the Museum. I had come to realize that I could make my own contribution to the study of ancient Egypt through the Wilbour Library and planned my courses of study around that goal. It was during those years that Mr. Bothmer's influence on me began. His knowledge of bibliography was immense, and so he naturally took as great an interest in the Wilbour Library as in the Museum's Egyptian collection. I often worked with him in the areas of bibliography, cataloguing and even acquisition, as well as in object collection, photograph and slide collections, and, finally, with the Corpus itself. I was able to observe his working methods firsthand and particularly saw the utmost skill and care with which he organized his research material. The communication of his high standards of scholarly excellence was Mr. Bothmer's greatest legacy to me personally.

I leave it to others to recount with detail the landmarks of Bernard V. Bothmer's long career in Egyptology, as Mr. T.G.H. James did so well in the London Times on Friday, December 3, 1993. I simply want to communicate my own experience of Mr. Bothmer the scholar and teacher. To be sure, there were many times when he was difficult, dictatorial, even frightening. When I first went to work at the Brooklyn Museum, the power of his personality overwhelmed me into silence. As I learned my own profession and had my skills tested by him, I developed a level of competence which has served me well in my career. For this I am deeply indebted to Bernard V. Bothmer.

Bernard V. Bothmer Homepage

©2004 Edward K. Werner; text ©1994 Diane Bergman
Last updated: May 12, 2004