the collection of Oriental antiquities and manuscripts. 9 A century later, in
1818, the Oriental Cabinet of the Kunstkamerawas founded. Also known as the
Asiatic Museum of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, the formation of this
collection was the idea of the president of the Academy, Count Sergei S. Uvarov
(1786–1855). TheWrst museum director (1818–42) was the academician
Christian Fraehn (1782–1851), considered an authority in theWeld of Asian
antiquities. Antiquarian collecting also included Islamic antiquities. Islamic
coins, for example, were collected by Mikhail Ivanovitch Doguel. He was a
professor of international law and an expert in theWeld of Oriental numis-
matics, who in 1912 was elected a member of the Russian Archaeological
Society. Count Alexey Aleksandrovich Bobrinsky (1852–1927), the president
of the Oriental Section of the Imperial Russian Archaeological Society and,
between 1886 and 1917, the head of the Imperial Archaeological Commission,
was also awell-known collector of Islamic antiquities from Central Asia, Persia,
Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt (Ivanov 2004).
Beyond antiquarian collecting, more actual archaeological research was
undertaken on Islamic monuments in Central Asia, a work that focused on
the western section of the ancient Silk Road cities of Merv and Samarkand
(see map 2, for the archaeology of the central and eastern sections of the Silk
Road see Chapter 7). Merv was one of the oasis cities along the Silk Road in
Central Asia with a long history stretching back to theWfth centurybce, and
which had converted to Islam in the seventh centuryce. TheWrst sketches of
Merv had been published by the Irish correspondent Edmund O’Donovan
(1844–83) in 1882, two years before the Russian invasion. After this, the
construction of the trans-Caspian railway brought the ruins to scholars’
attention. It was excavated for the Imperial Archaeological Commission by
V. A. Zhukhosky, a leading Russian Orientalist and medievalist, in 1890. He
undertook a topographic survey and photographed the monuments, publish-
ingThe Ruins of Old Mervin Russian in 1894. A few years after Zhukhosky,
Pumpelly looked for the prehistoric remains of the site, as mentioned earlier.
The second Islamic site to be excavated before the Russian Revolution was
Samarkand in today’s Uzbekistan. The description made in ancient manu-
scripts of theWfteenth-century astronomical observatory built in Timurid
style by Ulugh Beg led an amateur archaeologist, Vladimir Vyatkin, to its
location. Vyatkin also unearthed the sextant on Kukhak Hill, northeast of
Afrasiab, the city, originally known as Maracanda, that had been destroyed by
Genghis Khan.
9 On the web page for the Archive of Orientalists of the St Petersburg branch of the Institute
of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (www nd-a) and on that for the Asiatic
Museum (www nd-b) several other collectors—all of them belonging to the aristocracy—are
mentioned.
262 Colonial Archaeology