Arno Poebel (1881–1958) was a German
Assyriologist
Assyriology (from Greek , ''Assyriā''; and , ''-logia'') is the archaeological, anthropological, and linguistic study of Assyria and the rest of ancient Mesopotamia (a region that encompassed what is now modern Iraq, northeastern Syria, sout ...
. He studied theology and classical philology in Heidelberg, Marburg, Zürich and Jena. In 1905/6, he worked with Sumerian documents at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, submitting an edition of Sumerian legal documents as his dissertation in 1906.
He taught at
Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hemisphere. It consi ...
, Baltimore during 1911 to 1913, editing further Sumerian texts at the
Pennsylvania Museum during 1912 to 1914. Among his most important finds was discovering and translating the flood story of the
Sumerian creation myth in the collection of cuneiform tablets recovered from digs at Sippur and stored at the University of Pennsylvania. This tablet, dated from c.1700-1600 BC, is the earliest known version of the various forms of
flood myth
A flood myth or a deluge myth is a myth in which a great flood, usually sent by a deity or deities, destroys civilization, often in an act of divine retribution. Parallels are often drawn between the flood waters of these myths and the prima ...
from Mesopotamia. He was at the University of Rostock during 1919 to 1928. His Sumerian grammar (1923) was seminal to the field of
Sumerology and remains relevant.
Poebel emigrated to the United States in 1928, becoming professor of Assyriology and Sumerology at the University of Chicago Oriental Institute in 1930. He was editor of the
Chicago Assyrian Dictionary
The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (CAD) or The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago is a nine-decade project at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute to compile a dictionary of the Akkadian language an ...
from 1933 until his retirement in 1946.
Bibliography
*Babylonian Legal and Business Documents. Philadelphia 1909.
Vol. VVol. VI
Historical and Grammatical Texts
Philadelphia 1914.
*Sumerische Studien. Hinrichs, Leipzig 1921.
*Grundzüge der sumerischen Grammatik. Rostock 1923.
*Sumerische Untersuchungen. De Gruyter, Berlin 1927–1929.
References
*Walther Sallaberger: "Poebel, Arno" in: Peter Kuhlmann, Helmuth Schneider (eds.), '' Geschichte der Altertumswissenschaften'', Stuttgart/Weimar 2012, 989f.
*Samuel Noah Kramer
Arno Poebel and Sumerian Grammar
chapter 3 of ''In the World of Sumer: An Autobiography'', Wayne State University Press, 1988.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Poebel, Arno
German Assyriologists
1881 births
1958 deaths
German emigrants to the United States
Johns Hopkins University faculty