Education
Minutoli initially received a wholly private education, then attended secondary school in Karlsruhe (1782 to 1784) and was instructed in military matters by an Austrian captain in the engineers.
anthropologist archaeologist explorer art historian
Minutoli initially received a wholly private education, then attended secondary school in Karlsruhe (1782 to 1784) and was instructed in military matters by an Austrian captain in the engineers.
He served as a bombardier for two years in the field artillery corps, then received officer training in an infantry regiment stationed in Magdeburg from 1789. Also from this date, because the training did not intellectually satisfy him, he learned Greek, Latin, Italian and English. He was invalided out of the military at only 21, however, after suffering a serious arm injury in the defence of fort Gustavsburg in Mainz on 29 June 1793 during the Siege of Mainz.
He was called up again in 1794 as Stabskapitän, teacher and instructor at the officer cadet corps in Berlin for nobles, heading it from 1797.
Minutoli was highly interested in ancient art and, after prince Carl had reached adulthood, Minutoli undertook numerous foreign trips. He was entrusted in 1820 with the direction of an expedition that until August 1821 was paid for by the Egyptian government.
The scientists Wilhelm Friedrich Hemprich and Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, the architecture professor Liman and the Orientalist Scholz, among others, accompanied him. Minutoli"s collections, of which a large part was lost in a shipwreck, were purchased by the king of Prussia for 22,000 talers and formed the foundation of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin.
Heinrich Menu von Minutoli married Wolfradine von Schulenburg (who also became known as an Egyptologist) and they had three sons: Julius (a Berlin chief of police and envoy to the Qajar court in Persia), Adolph and Alexander.
Prussian Academy of Sciences. German Archaeological Institute]
Minutoli was appointed a member of the academy of the sciences, and soon retired (with the rank of Generalleutnant) to an estate in Lausanne, where he died in 1846.