Charles Bellino and the Beginnings of Assyriology

On 12th November 1820 died in Mosul a little known young man named Carl, or Charles, Bellino. Aged only 29, he had already taken a serious place among those who laid the foundations of the study of cuneiform. Yet already in 1890 a German scholar writing an important study of its decipherment by Grotefend, confessed that he had almost no information about Bellino's life and career. As my German and Austrian friends and colleagues, (notably Professor K. Bittel, who felt a special interest in his young fellow-Württemberger), had most helpfully provided me with interesting fresh material about this young pioneer scholar of Mesopotamian studies, linked closely with England, I here offer it combined with other gleanings in the form of a brief biography in honour of Sir Max Mallowan. This will, I hope, supplement the very short accounts which are all that at present are available in print. Carl Bellino was born on 21 January 1791 at the little town of Rottenburg (or Rothenburg) on the lovely river Neckar, near Tubingen in the then Kingdom of Württemberg, as the eldest of five children of Franz Josef Bellino (b. 1762) a silk and salt merchant and senator of that town and his first wife Anna Maria Beck, daughter of the postmaster of Günzburg. Franz Josef was himself born at Buchhorn (now called Friedrichshafen) in 1762 and was connected with Michael Bellini, a merchant of Venetian origin from Amsterdam who married Elizabeth Bianchi (or Weiss) at Heilbronn in 1727.