Everything about Julius Oppert totally explained
Julius Oppert (
July 9,
1825 -
August 21,
1905),
French-
German Assyriologist, was born at
Hamburg, of
Jewish parents.
After studying at
Heidelberg,
Bonn and
Berlin, he graduated at
Kiel in
1847; and in the following year went to France, where he was teacher of German at Laval and at Reims. His leisure was given to
Oriental studies, in which he'd made great progress in Germany.
In
1851, he joined the French archaeological mission to
Mesopotamia and
Media under
Fulgence Fresnel. On his return in
1854, he was naturalized as a French citizen in recognition of his services. He occupied himself in digesting the results of the expedition, with special attention to the
cuneiform inscriptions he'd collected.
In
1855, he published
Écriture Anarienne, advancing the theory that the language originally spoken in Assyria was
Turanian (related to
Turkish and
Mongolian), rather than
Aryan or
Semitic in origin, and that its speakers had invented the cuneiform writing system. Although the classification of the "Casdo-Scythian" inscriptions as Turanian would later come into doubt, scholarship would confirm Oppert in his identification of the discrete character of the
Sumerian language (as he renamed it in
1869) and the origin of its script.
In
1856 he published
Chronologie des Assyriens et des Babyloniens.
In
1857, he was appointed professor of
Sanskrit and comparative
philology in the school of languages connected with the
National Library of France, and in this capacity he produced his
Grammaire Sanscrite (
1859). But his attention was chiefly given to
Assyrian and cognate subjects.
His account of the Fresnel mission and the results of his consequent study were published as
Expédition Scientifique en Mésopotamie (
1859-
1863), with the second volume entitled
Déchiffrement des inscriptions cunéiformes.
In
1865 he published a history of Assyria and
Chaldaea (
Histoire des Empires de Chaldée et d'Assyrie) in the light of new archaeological findings. His Assyrian grammar,
Éléments de la grammaire assyrienne, was published in
1868. In
1869 Oppert was appointed professor of Assyrian philology and archaeology at the College de France.
In
1876, Oppert began to focus on the antiquities of
ancient Media and its language, writing
Le Peuple et la langue des Médes (
1879).
In
1881, he was admitted to the
Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and in
1890, he was elected to its presidency.
He died in Paris on the 21st of August,
1905.
Bibliography
Oppert was a voluminous writer upon Assyrian mythology and
jurisprudence, and other subjects connected with the ancient civilizations of the East. Among his other works may be mentioned:
- L'Immortalité de idiome chez les Chaldéens, (1875)
- Salomon el ses successeurs (1877)
- Doctrines juridiques de l'Assyrie et de la Chaldée (1877, with Joachim Menant).
A list of his articles may be found in
Haupt and
Delitzsch,
Beiträge zur Assyriologie (Leipzig, 1891).
(External Link
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