Ivane Javakhishvili

Ivane Alexandres dze Javakhishvili (Georgian: ივანე ჯავახიშვილი; 23 April 1876 – 18 November 1940) was a Georgian historian and linguist whose works heavily influenced the modern scholarship of the history and culture of Georgia. He was one of the founding fathers of the Tbilisi State University (1918) and its rector from 1919 to 1926.

Biography

Ivane Javakhishvili was born in Tbilisi, Georgia (part of Imperial Russia at the time) to the aristocratic family of Prince Alexander Javakhishvili, who served as an educator at the Tbilisi Gymnasium. Having graduated from the Faculty of Oriental Studies of the St. Petersburg University in 1899, he became a privat-docent of the Chair of Armenian and Georgian Philology at his alma mater. From 1901 to 1902, he was a visiting scholar at the University of Berlin. In 1902, he accompanied his mentor, Academician Nikolai Marr, to Mount Sinai where they studied medieval Georgian manuscripts (such as the Georgian manuscripts of Saint Paul's letters). After the first volumes of Javakhishvili's monumental, but yet unfinished, kartveli eris istoria (A History of the Georgian Nation) appeared between 1908 and 1914, the young scholar quickly established himself as a preeminent authority on Georgian and Caucasian history, Georgian law, paleography, diplomacy, music, drama and other subjects, producing landmark studies in these fields.

Early in 1918, he was instrumental in founding Georgia's first regular university in Tbilisi, thus realizing a long-time dream cherished by generations of Georgian intellectuals but consistently frustrated by the Imperial Russian authorities. The Tbilisi University (present-day I. Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, TSU, of his namesake), of which Javakhishvili became a professor and the head of the Department of the History of Georgia, rapidly assumed a dominant position in Georgia's educational life.