Alan Ralph Millard (1 December 1937 – 6 June 2024) was a British orientalist who was Rankin Professor of

Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...

and Ancient

Semitic languages The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. They include Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya language, Tigrinya, Aramaic, Hebrew language, Hebrew, Maltese language, Maltese, Modern South Arabian language ...

, and Honorary Senior Fellow (Ancient Near East), at the School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology (SACE) in the

University of Liverpool The University of Liverpool (abbreviated UOL) is a Public university, public research university in Liverpool, England. Founded in 1881 as University College Liverpool, Victoria University (United Kingdom), Victoria University, it received Ro ...

. Millard worked on excavations at Tell Nebi Mend (ancient Qadesh-on-the-Orontes) and Tell Rif'at (ancient Arpad) in Syria, at

Petra Petra (; "Rock"), originally known to its inhabitants as Raqmu (Nabataean Aramaic, Nabataean: or , *''Raqēmō''), is an ancient city and archaeological site in southern Jordan. Famous for its rock-cut architecture and water conduit systems, P ...

in Jordan, and at the

Assyria Assyria (Neo-Assyrian cuneiform: , ''māt Aššur'') was a major ancient Mesopotamian civilization that existed as a city-state from the 21st century BC to the 14th century BC and eventually expanded into an empire from the 14th century BC t ...

n capital

Nimrud Nimrud (; ) is an ancient Assyrian people, Assyrian city (original Assyrian name Kalḫu, biblical name Calah) located in Iraq, south of the city of Mosul, and south of the village of Selamiyah (), in the Nineveh Plains in Upper Mesopotamia. ...

(ancient Kalḫu) in Iraq. While working at the

British Museum The British Museum is a Museum, public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human cu ...

1961–1964, he rediscovered the Epic of Atrahasis, which had lain unrecognised in a drawer for some decades. From 1964 to 1970 he was Librarian at Tyndale House, Cambridge, and taught Akkadian for a year at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a collegiate university, federal Public university, public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The ...

. In 1970 he was appointed Rankin Lecturer in Hebrew and Ancient Semitic Languages at the University of Liverpool. He was a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) in the

Hebrew University of Jerusalem The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI; ) is an Israeli public university, public research university based in Jerusalem. Co-founded by Albert Einstein and Chaim Weizmann in July 1918, the public university officially opened on 1 April 1925. ...

in 1984, studying in a team led by Yigael Yadin. His main interest lay in Semitic

epigraphy Epigraphy () is the study of inscriptions, or epigraphs, as writing; it is the science of identifying graphemes, clarifying their meanings, classifying their uses according to dates and cultural contexts, and drawing conclusions about the wr ...

, and in editing Akkadian

cuneiform Cuneiform is a Logogram, logo-Syllabary, syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. Cuneiform script ...

tablets and

Aramaic Aramaic (; ) is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, Sinai, southeastern Anatolia, and Eastern Arabia, where it has been continually written a ...

inscriptions. Scribal practices in the

ancient Near East The ancient Near East was home to many cradles of civilization, spanning Mesopotamia, Egypt, Iran (or Persia), Anatolia and the Armenian highlands, the Levant, and the Arabian Peninsula. As such, the fields of ancient Near East studies and Nea ...

remained a dominant concern for him; the importance he ascribed to this topic stems largely from his belief as an Evangelical Christian in the essential historicity of the Bible – a point of view he shared with his colleague at Liverpool, the Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen. Millard was a Fellow of the

Society of Antiquaries of London The Society of Antiquaries of London (SAL) is a learned society of historians and archaeologists in the United Kingdom. It was founded in 1707, received its royal charter in 1751 and is a Charitable organization, registered charity. It is based ...

, a member of the Society for Old Testament Study – and was also Vice-Chairman of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. He died on 6 June 2024, at the age of 86.Obituary: Professor Alan Millard
University of Liverpool

Publications

*''Atrahasis: The Babylonian Story of the Flood'' (with W.G. Lambert), Clarendon Press, Oxford (1969); reprinted Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake, Indiana, (1999) * *
''Daniel 1–6 and History''
(1977) * *''La Statue de Tell Fekherye et son inscription bilingue assyro-araméenne'' (with A. Abou-Assaf and P. Bordreuil), Association pour la diffusion de la pensée française, Paris (1982) * Reprinted as: *''Discoveries from the Time of Jesus'' (1990) * * *''The Eponyms of the Assyrian Empire, 910–612 BC'', State Archives of Assyria Studies 2, The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, University of Helsinki (1994)
''The Knowledge of Writing in Iron Age Palestine''
(1995) *''Discoveries from Bible Times'', Lion Publishing, Oxford (1997) *''Dictionary of the Ancient Near East'' (edited, with Piotr Bienkowski), British Museum Press, London (2000) *''Reading and Writing in the Time of Jesus'', Sheffield Academic Press, Sheffield (2000) * *

References

External links

Research Interests & Publication List from SACE websiteBibliographyThe Alphabet: Its Creation and Development
– appearance on the BBC Radio 4 discussion programme ' In Our Time' (2003)
''Did Christ Leave a Paper Trail?''
– text of an interview with Millard (2004)

– a review in '' Journal of Hebrew Scriptures'' 7 (2007) of this

festschrift In academia, a ''Festschrift'' (; plural, ''Festschriften'' ) is a book honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during their lifetime. It generally takes the form of an edited volume, containing contributions from the h ...

, edited by Piotr Bienkowski, Christopher Mee and Elizabeth Slater, New York and London (2005) {{DEFAULTSORT:Millard, Alan 1937 births 2024 deaths Academics of the University of Liverpool Academics of SOAS University of London British orientalists English Assyriologists British biblical scholars Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries of London Christian Hebraists Employees of the British Museum Old Testament scholars

Publications

See also

References

External links