Mikhail Masson

Mikhail Yevgenyevich Masson was born in St Petersburg on 3 December 1897 (21 November in the old style). His father, Yevgeny Ludvigovich, was a topographer descended from a French nobleman who had settled in Russia during the Jacobin Terror; his mother, Antonina Nikolayevna, was born Shpakovskaya. From almost the day he was born the boy lived with his mother in Samarkand.

His interest in antiquities began at school: in 1908–1909 he took part in the excavation of Ulugh Beg’s observatory under the archaeologist V. L. Vyatkin, who in 1912 put him in charge of a section of the dig. In 1916 Masson graduated from the Samarkand men’s gymnasium with a gold medal and entered the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute to train as an irrigation engineer. Army service interrupted his studies: he fought on the South-Western Front and in 1917 was elected to a Council of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.

In 1918 he returned to Samarkand, where he headed the regional museum and added to its collections. From 1924 he worked in Tashkent for the committee on museums and the protection of ancient monuments, running the archaeological department of the Central Asian Main Museum; he also attended courses at the Turkestan Oriental Institute, took part in the restoration of monuments and advised museums across the Central Asian republics. In 1929–1936 he studied the history of mining at the Geological Committee of Uzbekistan and built up its geological library, while continuing to lead the archaeological sector of the monuments committee.

From 1936 Masson headed the department of archaeology at Central Asian State University in Tashkent (as a professor from 1940), and in the same year he received a doctorate in archaeology. In 1936–1938 he excavated Kushan and medieval Termez, and in 1946 he took charge of the South Turkmenistan Archaeological Complex Expedition, which worked in the Turkmen SSR: under him the Parthian sites of Nisa and Merv were explored. He was also among the members of the expedition that opened the Timurid tombs in the Gur-e-Amir in Samarkand.

His interests were wide: the historical topography of Samarkand, Bukhara and Tashkent, coinage and numismatics, the history of mining, architecture, epigraphy and the historical geography of Central Asia. More than thirty collections and monographs appeared under his editorship, together with eighteen volumes of the South Turkmenistan expedition’s proceedings; in all he wrote some three hundred works. Masson created the Central Asian school of archaeology; his students included O. M. Rostovtsev, E. V. Rtveladze, B. D. Kochnev and V. I. Sarianidi.

He was an Honoured Scientist of the Uzbek SSR (1944) and of the Turkmen SSR (1950), a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Turkmen SSR (1951), and in 1968 received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. His second wife was the archaeologist G. A. Pugachenkova; his son Vadim, from his first marriage, also became an archaeologist. Mikhail Masson died in Tashkent in 1986 and was buried in the Dombrabad cemetery.