[1] After changing their locations a number of times, those van Berchems settled in what is now Romandy, the French-speaking Western part of Switzerland, around 1764/65 and became citizens of the republic and canton of Geneva in 1816.

[5] The fact that they were both buried at the Cimetière des Rois ("Cemetery of Kings"), the city's "Panthéon" in Plainpalais, where the right to rest is strictly limited to distinguished personalities, illustrates the privileged status they enjoyed in Geneva's society.

Major sources of inspiration for these interests were van Berchem's elder cousin Lucien Gautier (1850-1924), a professor of Hebrew and Old Testament exegesis at the University of Lausanne, and the eminent Egyptologist Édouard Naville (1844-1926).

In April 1883, Max van Berchem moved to Strasbourg to study during the summer semester at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-University under the mentorship of Theodor Nöldeke (1836-1930), another eminent German orientalist and author of the standard work "The History of the Qur’ān".

In late 1883, Max van Berchem moved to Berlin to continue his studies at the Friedrich Wilhelm University, where he joined his brother Victor.

His main academic inspiration there became Eduard Sachau (1845-1930), a professor for Semitic philology who - unlike some of his "armchair" colleagues - based his expertise also on travels in the Middle East.

[3] At the end of the same year, he travelled for the first time to the Arab world, accompanied by his mother, who was seeking to spend the winter in a warm and dry climate for health reasons.

Following his participation at the 8th Congress of Orientalists in Stockholm in September 1889, Max van Berchem returned in December of that year to Cairo where he started a campaign to systematically collect Arabic inscriptions.

He was especially encouraged to do this by the French orientalist Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, who had been attaché to the legations in the Ottoman Empire and now urged van Berchem to document as many inscriptions as possible, since many were lost already to modern buildings.

On 9 June 1891, Max van Berchem married Elisabeth Lucile Frossard de Saugy,[4] whose artistocratic parents both had a background of serving at the royal court of Bavaria.

He reasoned:«Islamic monuments are in a state of neglect, their ruins, though beautiful yet, will soon be no more than the shapeless remains of a glorious artistic past; the historical inscriptions they bear are vanishing.

In the beginning of April 1894, van Berchem travelled via Alexandria, Beirut and Hauran, where he was joined by two German diplomats with a shared interest in epigraphy, to Damascus.

Upon his return to Geneva, van Berchem joined the organising committee of the 10th Congress of Orientalists which was held in his hometown during the first half of September 1894 and chaired by Édouard Naville, the father-in-law of his brother Victor.

Apart from Naville and van Berchem, Geneva was also home to two other eminent Orientalists: Ferdinand de Saussure, an expert for the Indo-Iranian languages, and the sinologist François Turrettini.

[3]Apart from those family affairs, Max van Berchem dedicated most of his time and energy during the first years of the new century towards the publication of the large amounts of textual material that he had accumulated.

When van Berchem fell ill in Cairo, he hastily returned to Switzerland and was hospitalised in the clinic "Vers la Rive" in Vaumarcus at Lake Neuchâtel.

[23] The inscription on his gravestone, a white obelisk, quotes 2 Corinthians 5:17: «TOUTES CHOSES SERONT FAITES NOUVELLES» ("all things will have become new")  Still in 1921, van Berchem's widow Alice donated a part of his collection of artefacts to Geneva's Musée d’art et d’histoire (MAH).

[24] Van Berchem's work was partly continued by his oldest daughter Marguerite (1892 – 1984) who also played a prominent role in the ICRC since the First World War.

[25] Based on study trips, especially to Italy, she published in 1924 a book about Christian mosaics from the 4th to 10th centuries with drawings by her younger half-sister Marcelle and in collaboration with the archivist and palaeographer Étienne Clouzot (1881–1944).

In the second half of the 1920s, the architectural historian Keppel Archibald Cameron Creswell entrusted her with the study of the mosaics of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and of the Great Mosque of Damascus.

[3] The results of Marguerite van Berchem's research on the two religious sites, where her father had done epigraphic studies, were published by Creswell in 1932 as an independent part under her own name in the first volume of his seminal work Early Muslim Architecture.

[3] The mansion, which was built in 1715 at the Plateau de Frontenex in Cologny overlooking Lake Geneva, was the home of his aunt Augusta Sarasin, who survived him.

[31] It kept the ownership of the archives but in 1987 deposited its main part on the premises of the Foundation in the Champel quarter of Geneva, with the exception of van Berchem's correspondences and the Etienne Combe papers.

On the other side, it also funds archaeological missions, research programs and study projects about Islamic art and architecture in a multitude of countries, not only in the Arabic world.

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Max van Berchem's death, the MAH honoured him in cooperation with his namesake foundation and the Bibliothèque de Genève from 16 April until 6 June 2021 by hosting the exposition«The adventure of Arabic epigraphy».