Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (1788–1865): Comparing Prehistoric Antiquities

Abstract

hristian Jürgensen Thomsen published his essay “Kortfattet Udsigt over Mindesmærker og Oldsager fra Nordens Fortid” in January 1837. Thomsen was not an academic by occupation or training, but the son of a rich merchant family in Copenhagen and trained as a businessman. However, he was a passionate antiquarian and collector of antiquities. Since 1816, he had served as voluntary curator for the collection of the Danish Royal Commission for the Preservation of Antiquities. He had transformed this collection into the Royal Museum of Nordic Antiquities, open to the general public as of 1819, and the essay explained his curatorial principles, most importantly the division of prehistory into the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. The essay appeared in a collected volume, Ledetraad til Nordisk Oldkyndighed, published by the Danish Royal Society for Ancient Nordic Manuscripts. The volume, which also contained an essay on Nordic manuscripts by the literary scholar and later Copenhagen professor Niels Matthias Petersen, was intended to promote the work of the society abroad. Later in 1837 the society also published a German translation and an English translation followed in 1848. These were mailed to scholars, libraries, and universities across northern Europe. Thomsen’s essay, therefore, almost immediately reached a large European audience. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, historians of archaeology have described Thomsen’s essay as an important beginning of modern “scientific” archaeology. During the nineteenth century, the essay also served as a model for museum-based research in the human sciences and comparative studies of human artifacts.