The State Hermitage Museum: Hermitage News

Opening of a permanent exhibition following restoration of the Caucasus Rooms

Boris Borisovich Piotrovsky (1908-1990) and the archeological excavations at Karmir Blura

Boris Borisovich Piotrovsky was the founder of Russia's Urartu studies. Thanks to his archeological excavations of Urartu fortresses in Armenia and publications on the monuments found there, systematic scientific investigation of the culture and art of the Urartu kingdom replaced the previous interpretations of arbitrary finds.

Boris Piotrovsky's interests were very broad. From childhood he was drawn to Ancient Egypt. While he was still a pupil in school, he attended classes in the Hermitage's Department of Antiquities, which at the time combined the Ancient Orient and the Antiquities collections. He then went on to study Egyptology in Leningrad University. Beginning in his university days, Boris Piotrovsky took part in a variety of archeological expeditions to the Northern Caucasus and the South of Russia. The Caucasus, in his own words, gradually began to displace distant Egypt in his life.

In1930, Boris Piotrovsky graduated from the historical and linguistics department of the university with a specialization in archeology. In 1931, he arrived at the Hermitage, where he was employed as a scholarly staff member. Even earlier, during his last year at the university, Boris Piotrovsky began to work for the Academy of History of Material Culture, in the Language Sector, which was then headed by Academician Nikolai Marr. A year later, at the initiative of Marr, he was sent to Armenia for the first time in order to search for traces of the ancient state of Urartu that once existed there. Archeological investigation, multi-disciplinary analysis and historical interpretation of Urartu monuments were for many years the main direction of his scientific activity.

The choice of Karmir-blura (Red Hill) on the western outskirts of Yerevan to be the object of archeological excavation was the fruit of Boris Piotrovsky's painstaking searches, long contemplation and subtle scientific intuition. This selection fully justified itself. Thanks to many years (1939 to 1971) of archeological excavations carried out jointly between the archeological expedition of the Academy of Sciences of the Armenian SSR and the State Hermitage under the direction of Boris Piotrovsky, the ancient city of Teishebaini was uncovered. Teishebaini's ruins were found under the “Red Hill” and are now one of the most interesting and most fully researched monuments of Urartu civilization.

In the course of the excavations, research was carried out on a citadel and also on several residential buildings of a settlement located at the foot of Karmir-blur. Teishebaini - or “the city of the god Teisheby” - was founded by one of the last Urartu kings, Rusa II, in the 7th century B.C. It was a major administrative and economic center of Transcaucasia, the place where viceroy stayed and where there was a standing garrison. It was here that tribute collected in the neightboring districts was brought. The citadel accupied the surface of a rocky hill of around 4 hectares and was virtually a single structure having, evidently, two or three floors. On the ground floor were about 150 rooms used for household purposes, for example storage rooms for wine, with huge vessels having an overall capacity of 400,000 liters, and storerooms for grain, accommodating about 750 tons all together. The walls of the building were made of adobe brick, and stone was used for the foundation and cornices. The state rooms of the upper floors collapsed during a fire which occurred when the fortress was stormed. Evidently it was destroyed during a sudden attack. The collapsed upper part buried the contents of the storerooms, including a huge quantity of metallic objects - mainly made of bronze -which bear incised inscriptions showing that they were older than the fortress itself. A large part of them belonged to kings of the 8th century B.C. - Menua, Argishti I, Sarduri II and Rusa I. Some of them tell us directly that they were made for the fortress at Erebuni, which was located not far from Teishebaini, and date from a time when construction of the latter was already abandoned and the objects it contained were moved to the storerooms of the new citadel.

In Boris Piotrovsky's scholarly works - archeological reports on the excavations at Karmir-blura (1950, 1952, 1955) and his monographs The History and Culture of Urartu (1944), The Van Kingdom (Urartu) (1959) and The Art of Urartu, 8th - 6th Centuries B.C. (1962) - we find the first account of the the results of investigation into all the then known monuments of Urartu culture and art in their archeological and historical context. To this day they have not lost their scientific value and are among the most frequently cited works of Urartu studies.

A large part of Boris Piotrovsky's life was connected with the Hermitage. This is where he made his life's journey from curious school boy interested in ancient history to world-renowned scholar and museum director. He became the director of the State Hermitage in 1964 and remained at this post to the end of his life.

The room which contains the exhibition on The Art of Urartu is dedicated to the memory of Academician Boris Borisovich Piotrovsky, director of the Hermitage from 1964 to 1990. This is set down on a marble memorial plaque immortalizing his name.