62 Facts About Ludwig Ross

Ludwig Ross was a German classical archaeologist.

Ludwig Ross was an important figure in the early years of archaeology in the independent Kingdom of Greece, serving as Ephor General of Antiquities between 1834 and 1836.

Ludwig Ross was forced to resign as Ephor General over his delivery of the Athenian "Naval Records", a series of inscriptions first unearthed in 1834, to the German August Bockh for publication.

Ludwig Ross was appointed as the first professor of archaeology at the University of Athens, but lost his post as a result of the 3 September 1843 Revolution, which removed most non-Greeks from public service in the country.

Ludwig Ross spent his final years as a professor in Halle, where he argued unsuccessfully against the reconstruction of the Indo-European language family, believing the Latin language to be a direct descendant of Ancient Greek.

Ludwig Ross has been called "one of the most important figures in the cultural revival of Greece".

Ludwig Ross is credited with creating the foundations for the science of archaeology in independent Greece, and for establishing a systematic approach to excavation and conservation in the earliest days of the country's formal archaeological practice.

Ludwig Ross was born on 22 July 1806 in Bornhoved in Holstein, then ruled by the Kingdom of Denmark.

When Ludwig Ross was four years old, his father moved the family to the Gut Altekoppel estate in Bornhoved, which he managed and later acquired.

Ludwig Ross did not consider himself Danish, and has generally been counted as German in modern scholarship.

Ludwig Ross began to study medicine, zoology and anthropology, but eventually settled upon classical philology.

Ludwig Ross was taught by the classicist Johann Matthias Schultz, whose lectures focused largely on Greek and Roman literature, including the Greek playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Aristophanes, as well as philosophical studies of Cicero and Lucretius.

Ludwig Ross graduated on 16 May 1829 with a PhD on Aristophanes's play Wasps, supervised by Nitzsch.

Ludwig Ross made an unsuccessful application for a scholarship from the "Fund for the Public Benefit", administered on behalf of the King of Denmark, to travel in Greece.

Ludwig Ross applied again to the "Fund for the Public Benefit", with Nitzsch's support, in October 1830; he was accepted the following February.

Ludwig Ross spent nine months in Leipzig, beginning in the autumn of 1831, living with the school headmaster Karl Hermann Funkhaenel and attending lectures on Greek culture.

Ludwig Ross's first visit in the city was to the home of Kyriakos Pittakis: the husband of Teresa's sister and a self-taught archaeologist who would be appointed "custodian of the antiquities in Athens" a few weeks later.

Ludwig Ross had been expected to leave Greece in 1833, having unsuccessfully applied in 1832 for an extension of his travel scholarship, and subsequently applied successfully in May 1833 for 200 to help pay for his journey back to Germany.

Ludwig Ross subsequently accepted the Greek government's offer, in November 1833, of the post of "sub-ephor" of antiquities for the Peloponnese, alongside Pittakis for the rest of mainland Greece and Ioannis Kokkonis for Aegina.

Ludwig Ross organised a series of sporting competitions, similar to the ancient Olympic and Isthmian Games, on 4 March 1833, and encouraged the Greek government, through the royal family, to issue an 1837 decree re-establishing the Olympic Games in Pyrgos.

Ludwig Ross carried out excavations at Menelaion, a sanctuary near Sparta dedicated to the hero Menelaus and to Helen of Troy.

Ludwig Ross was paid a salary of 3,000 drachmas: a comfortable wage at a time when manual workers earned an average of 175 drachmas per year.

In 1834, Ludwig Ross was asked to compose a list of sites around the Acropolis that were most in need of protection, so that they could be acquired by the state.

Ludwig Ross's work was seen as part of the broader project of building Athens as the capital of the new Greek state: in 1835, Ludwig Ross became a member, and subsequently the chair, of the building commission responsible for the planning of the city and of the government's imminent move there from Nafplion.

Ludwig Ross hired eighty workers, split between the Parthenon and the sites to the west.

The first tasks were to demolish the modern bastion near the Tower of Athena Nike and the mosque inside the Parthenon, which Ludwig Ross justified in his letters to Klenze as necessary to prevent the re-militarisation of the Acropolis, both structures having previously been used by the military garrison.

At some point in 1835, Ludwig Ross sent casts of part of the Parthenon frieze to Falbe, who had them sent to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.

At a time when relatively few Greek archaeologists worked outside Athens, Ludwig Ross organised archaeological collections throughout the Cyclades, and conducted excavations on Thera in 1835.

Ludwig Ross remained closely connected with the Ottonian court, and guided Otto's father Ludwig I of Bavaria and the German nobleman Hermann von Puckler-Muskau during their respective visits to Greece.

Ludwig Ross corresponded closely with the British antiquarian William Martin Leake, who had travelled extensively through Greece in the early 19th century.

Ludwig Ross had a long-running feud with Kyriakos Pittakis, one of the first native Greeks employed by the Greek Archaeological Service.

Eleven days later, Ludwig Ross attempted to return to the Acropolis to study the inscriptions unearthed during his excavations there, but Pittakis denied him entry.

Ludwig Ross received the title of Ephor General in 1843.

Until 1838, Pittakis and others continued to write hostile articles against Ludwig Ross, accusing him of allowing foreign journals privileged access to Greek inscriptions, of improperly giving away antiquities to von Puckler-Muskau during his visit, and of plotting to flee the country with antiquities in his possession.

Ludwig Ross continued to dispute the allegations in the press until April 1838, but made no further response after an article written by Pittakis in May, entitled "Final Answer".

The archaeological historian Nikolaos Papazarkadas has argued that Pittakis's opposition to Ludwig Ross's actions was personal rather than principled, pointing out that Pittakis made no protest against the copying of several thousand Greek inscriptions by French epigraphers from 1843 onwards, a project supported by the prime minister, Ioannis Kolettis.

Ludwig Ross was granted the inaugural professorship of archaeology, one of the first such chairs in the world.

Ludwig Ross's professorship has generally been attributed to Otto's personal favour towards him: it has been suggested that the chair was created specifically for him.

Ludwig Ross's students included the future epigrapher and Ephor General Panagiotis Efstratiadis.

Ludwig Ross was elected as a member of the university's nine-member senate, where he supported the introduction of German-style, so-called "private lecturers" teaching without the status or rights of full professors.

Ludwig Ross was criticised on its publication for writing in Latin rather than Greek; this criticism may have been part of the reason why he delayed the publication of the second volume, which had been expected in 1835, until 1842.

Ludwig Ross toured the Cycladic islands in the 1830s, including a visit to Ios in 1837, where he was shown the contents of Early Bronze Age graves and correctly identified figurines from them as predating classical Greek civilisation, several decades before the Aegean Bronze Age was recognised in scholarship.

In 1841, Ludwig Ross published his Handbook of the Archaeology of the Arts, written in Greek.

Ludwig Ross argued for the dependence of Ancient Greek culture on that of Egypt and the ancient Near East, which contrasted with the then-fashionable view of Classical "purity" advanced by Johann Joachim Winckelmann and his successors, such as Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremere de Quincy and Karl Botticher.

Ludwig Ross published his explorations on Sikinos as The Archaeology of the Island of Sikinos.

Ludwig Ross subsequently travelled through the Greek islands and Asia Minor, making him one of the first Europeans to explore the interior of Caria and Lycia, in 1841 and 1843.

Ludwig Ross published an account of his travels as Journeys on the Greek Islands of the Aegean Sea in 1843 and 1845.

Ludwig Ross was appointed to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1836, and as a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in 1837.

Ludwig Ross unsuccessfully applied for an academic post in Dresden and for a travel grant from the Danish government to travel in southern Europe.

Ludwig Ross wrote to Moritz Hermann Eduard Meier at the University of Halle in the German state of Saxony, then ruled by Prussia, asking for a post there.

Ludwig Ross was succeeded as Professor of Archaeology at Athens by the Constantinople-born Greek archaeologist and polymath Alexandros Rizos Rangavis in 1844.

Ludwig Ross eventually took up his professorship at Halle in 1845.

Ludwig Ross's views were supported by the historian Julius Braun in Germany and by the archaeologist Desire-Raoul Rochette in Paris.

Ludwig Ross published the third volume of in 1845, and a treatise on the demes of Attica with his colleague Eduard Meier in 1846.

Ludwig Ross intended to publish his excavations of the Parthenon and the area of the Propylaia, complementing his 1839 publication of the Temple of Athena Nike, but had been forced by 1855 to abandon the project, partly due to financial constraints and partly due to the difficulty of collaborating with his co-authors Hansen and Schaubert without being physically present in Greece.

Early in 1847, Ludwig Ross married Emma Schwetschke, the daughter of his future collaborator Carl Gustav Schwetschke.

Ludwig Ross attempted, unsuccessfully, to treat his condition with spa cures.

Ludwig Ross may have suffered from syphilis, evidence of which the archaeological historian Ida Haugsted has traced to Ross's letters of early 1842.

Ludwig Ross continued to suffer from the depression which had begun to affect him in the later years of his time in Greece.

Ludwig Ross was buried in Bornhoved, alongside his brother, Charles, who had died of typhus the previous year.

Ludwig Ross has been praised as one of the greatest figures in Greek epigraphy and as an important force in its beginnings as an academic discipline.

Ludwig Ross has generally been viewed as a competent and successful Ephor General, whose service and resignation had considerable consequences for the development of Greek archaeology.