Elena Cassin, (1909 - June 2011), was an Italian-born French

Assyriologist Assyriology (from Ancient Greek, Greek , ''Assyriā''; and , ''-logy, -logia''), also known as Cuneiform studies or Ancient Near East studies, is the archaeological, anthropological, historical, and linguistic study of the cultures that used cune ...

Biography

Elena Cassin, daughter of the banker and politician Marco Cassin, studied the history of religions at the University of Rome and obtained her doctorate in 1933. She then went to Paris and attended Charles Fossey's course on ancient Babylon and Marcel Mauss' course on sociology. There she met her future husband, Jacques Vernant, brother of Jean-Pierre Vernant. She and the Vernant brothers participated in the

French Resistance The French Resistance ( ) was a collection of groups that fought the German military administration in occupied France during World War II, Nazi occupation and the Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy#France, collaborationist Vic ...

in the south of France. After the war Elena Cassin joined the

French National Centre for Scientific Research The French National Centre for Scientific Research (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 engi ...

as a specialist of Assyriology and of History of the Religions of 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 ...

. She worked mainly on the legal and economic history of ancient

Mesopotamia Mesopotamia is a historical region of West Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent. Today, Mesopotamia is known as present-day Iraq and forms the eastern geographic boundary of ...

. Between 1965 and 1967, together with Jean Bottéro and Jean Vercoutter, she was the editor of the three volumes of the (Fischer World History named after publishing house S. Fischer Verlag) devoted to the Ancient East. She herself dealt with Mesopotamia in the second half of the second millennium and thus with the

Mitanni Mitanni (–1260 BC), earlier called Ḫabigalbat in old Babylonian texts, ; Hanigalbat or Hani-Rabbat in Assyrian records, or in Ancient Egypt, Egyptian texts, was a Hurrian language, Hurrian-speaking state in northern Syria (region), Syria an ...

and Nuzi and she also translated Sumerian into French. She participated with other colleagues committed to the left ( Maxime Rodinson, Maurice Godelier, André-Georges Haudricourt, Charles Malamoud, Jean-Paul Brisson, Jean Yoyotte, Jean Bottero) in a

Marxist Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflic ...

think tank organised by Jean-Pierre Vernant. This group took on an institutional form with the creation, in 1964, of the ''Centre des recherches comparées sur les sociétés anciennes'', which later became the ''Centre Louis Gernet'', focusing more on the study of

ancient Greece Ancient Greece () was a northeastern Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity (), that comprised a loose collection of culturally and linguistically r ...

. Elena Cassin died at the age of 102.

Works

* ''L’adoption à Nuzi'', Paris, Adrien Maisonneuve, 1938. * . * . * ''La splendeur divine. Introduction à l'étude de la mentalité mésopotamienne'', Paris, 1968. * *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cassin, Elena 1909 births 2011 deaths Italian Assyriologists French Assyriologists French Resistance members French women centenarians Italian emigrants to France