Petr Charvát

Petr Charvát (12 January 1949 – 17 September 2023) was a Czech orientalist, archaeologist, and historian. His specialization was the archaeology and history of the Orient and older Czech history. He was married to historian Kateřina Charvátová. They have two sons. He appeared on Czech Television in the program Dvaasedmdesát jmen české historie. and Elena Charvátová. He spent part of his childhood in Baghdad, where his father served as a professor at university. In the meantime, after studying at the Faculty of Arts for a year he went to study at the University of Lagos for a year. In 1980, he was awarded the title of Candidate of Historical Sciences (CSc.) based on his dissertation in the field of medieval archaeology. From 1990 to 2005, he worked at the Oriental Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague's Malá Strana.

His specialization was broad, it consisted of cuneiform and archaeology of prehistoric and ancient southwestern Asia, the emergence of primary statehood and script-using civilizations at the turn between prehistory and antiquity in this region, the formation of the Přemyslid state in early medieval Bohemia, long-distance contacts of the Czech lands in the Middle Ages with special regard to non-European areas.

Career and research From 2006, he taught at the Faculty of Arts of the University of West Bohemia in Plzeň.

In 1974 he participated in an archaeological excavation of the tomb of the nobleman Ptahshepses in Abusir near Saqqara, Egypt, 25th century BCE). From 1982 to 1984 he took part in an excavation of a Buddhist monastery from the 1st millennium AD, Abhayagiri Vihara in Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka, joint project of the Sri Lankan government and UNESCO. In 1989 he participated in an excavation of Jemdet Nasr near Baghdad, as part of the British Archaeological Expedition in Iraq. His study stays included Berlin (1992), Poitiers, Paris (short trips in 1995–2001 and 2006–2008). From 1996, he was a member of the Spanish archaeological mission in Turkey.

He obtained the title of Doctor of Historical Sciences (DrSc.) in 1995 based on the monograph Ancient Mesopotamia – Humankind’s Long Journey into Civilization (Prague: The Oriental Institute 1993). In 1995, he habilitated in the field of Slavic archaeology at Masaryk University in Brno based on the work On Slavs, silk and the early state: The town of Čáslav in the pristine Middle Ages (Památky archeologické 85/1, 1994, pp. 108–153). On June 24, 2011, President Václav Klaus appointed him professor.

He spent the academic year 2003–2004 in Philadelphia (USA) on a John William Fulbright Foundation scholarship (studying archaeological material from the ancient Near East at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania). The iconography of pristine statehood. Painted pottery and seal impressions from Susa, southwestern Iran. Praha : Karolinum, 2005. . The Emergence of the Bohemian State. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010. ISSN 1872-8103. Signs from silence. Ur of the first Sumerians. Praha: Univerzita Karlova; Karolinum, 2017. .