Chaos en beheersing: the life of Henri Asselberghs and his friendship with Jean Capart

Abstract

In 1961 Henri Asselberghs published a pioneering study on the concepts of chaos versus control in Predynastic and Early Dynastic iconography. This book appears to have come out of the blue, with Asselberghs not having published on this early period of Egyptian history before, and him not being a professional Egyptologist, but rather the director of the Railway Museum in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Based on archival sources, the life and career of Asselberghs are reconstructed, which form the context for the genesis of his Chaos en beheersing. Special attention is paid to Asselberghs’ relationship with Belgian Egyptologist Jean Capart, with whom he struck up a friendship that would last a quarter century.