Friedrich Edward Schulz

Friedrich Edward Schulz was a German professor. Schulz had himself been recording inscriptions and other antiquities for the French government in the Lake Van area, until he was murdered by Kurds in 1829. [Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon - Page 42 by Lesley Adkins] [Studies in the Social Sciences - Page 11 by University of Minnesota]

Professor Edward Schultz was one of the first to obtain original information on Urartu. Later when Shulz was murdered his papers, containing 42 inscriptions found at Van and in its neighborhood, were saved. The later discoveries of Burnouf, Lassen and Rawlinson stimulated interest in Oriental antiquities. Layard visited Van in 1850 and took new copies of the inscriptions. Of special interest were one tablet on the rock of Van, and an inscription on a stone in a ruined wall. The first contains the name of Xerxes, son of Darius, in the same characters as those of Behistun and Persepolis. The second resembles Assyrian writings. All of the others are of a language peculiar to Van. Another mysterious text was read by Hincks in 1847, and following these Professor A. H. Sayce added "a new language and a new people to the museum of the ancient Oriental world." Thereafter the known Vannic texts were doubled in extent by the German archaeologists, Lehmann and Belck, who, in the words of Lynch, called up "a vanished civilization from the grave." But even so, alas, they could evoke only a broken and fragmentary body; so much has been lost by the ravages of war and vandalism and time.

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