Luciano Petech

Luciano Petech (8 June 1914, Trieste – 29 September 2010, Rome) was an Italian scholar of Himalayan history and the early relations between Tibet, Nepal and Italy. He was Chair of History of Eastern Asia at the University of Rome from 1955 to 1984. He is the most renowned of the students of Giuseppe Tucci.

Luciano Petech was born in 1914 and retired in 1984. He learned almost all European languages, included Latin, as well as Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, Newari, Sanskrit, Arabic, Hindi and Urdu. His gift for languages and output on Asia would have been considered prodigious, were it not for his predecessor in the field, Giuseppe Tucci. Tucci was described, on the centenary of his birth, as a ‘una sorta di Mozart della filologia classica’ (La Stampa June 2, 1994:19), a boy genius who wrote his first learned article at 17 years old. Tucci taught in Rabindranath Tagore’s Visva-Bharati University near Calcutta during the 1920s, visited Tibet for the first time in 1929 and then set up the Italian Institute for the Middle and Far East in 1933.

Petech refers to his mentor as ‘my guru and friend’ (e.g. 1958: vii). According to de Jong:

Petech first studied Arabic, but in 1934 began to follow Tucci’s lectures and decided to change the direction of his studies. He soon mastered Tibetan and, following the advice of Tucci, studied the chronicles of Ladakh. (Indo-Iranian Journal 40/4 (1997): 404)

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