Ernshtedt, Petr Viktorovich

Born June 9 (21), 1890, in Gatchina, in present-day Leningrad Oblast; died Dec. 25, 1966, in Leningrad. Soviet philologist and specialist in the area of the Greek, Coptic, and Hittite languages. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1946). Son of V. K. Ernshtedt.

Ernshtedt became a professor at Leningrad University in 1939. He published and commented upon Greek and Egyptian papyruses from the late Roman, Byzantine, and Arabic periods. He described collections of Coptic papyruses at the State Hermitage and the A. S. Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and is the author of the monograph Egyptian Borrowings in Greek (1953).