Field Notes
012
Scholar, Teacher, Mensch
The Death of america’s foremost Hittitologist
Hans Gustav Güterbock, 91, one of the most important cuneiform scholars and Hittitologists of the 20th century, died on March 29 at his home in Chicago.
Professor Güterbock was born in 1908 in Berlin. His mother was a novelist; his father, the secretary of a German archaeological society, encouraged him to take an interest in the ancient Near East. Güterbock studied at the universities of Berlin, Marburg and Leipzig, where he received his doctorate in Assyriology in 1933 for a dissertation on Hittite and Mesopotamian history. Being of Jewish extraction, he was prevented by Nazi racial laws from pursuing an academic career, so he left Germany to take a post at the newly founded Ankara University, where he was a professor of Hittitology from 1936 to 1948. In Ankara, along with his former teacher and fellow émigré Benno Landsberger, Güterbock trained the first generation of Turkish specialists in ancient Near Eastern languages. He was also involved in the planning and construction of the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in the Turkish capital.
After spending a year as a guest lecturer at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, Güterbock moved in 1949 to the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, where he taught until retiring in 1976 as the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor. Far from resting on his laurels, Professor Güterbock devoted his retirement to the Chicago Hittite Dictionary, which he founded and edited with Harry A. Hoffner, Jr., his successor as Professor of Hittite at the Oriental Institute. Even when Professor Güterbock’s eyesight failed in his last years, he continued to work from his prodigious memory. To keep up his work on the dictionary, he made enlarged photocopies of scholarly articles; when that was no longer sufficient, he had the literature read aloud to him. The Chicago Hittite Dictionary was approximately one-third complete at the time of his death.
A man of broad reach, Professor Güterbock was one of few Hittitologists fully at home in linguistics and history, philology and archaeology, and Anatolian and Mesopotamian studies. He participated in publishing ten volumes of cuneiform inscriptions excavated at the site of the Hittite capital of Hattusa (modern
While he did pioneering work in many areas, his studies of Hittite religious organization and Hittite mythology and literature have been particularly influential; and his work on Hittite seal inscriptions was crucial to the decipherment of Hittite hieroglyphics. A selection of his essays, Perspectives on Hittite Civilization (Chicago, 1997), serves as a convenient and reliable introduction to the history and culture of the Hittites. Professor Güterbock’s reminiscences and observations on the development of Hittite studies, “Resurrecting the Hittites,” can be found in Volume IV of Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (New York, 1995).
For several generations of students at the Oriental Institute, Professor Güterbock was an inspiring teacher. He also took great interest in his younger colleagues; numerous Hittitologists, including this writer, will remain forever grateful for the patient guidance he afforded them early in their careers.
In recent years, Professor Güterbock received honorary doctorates from the universities of Uppsala and Ankara, as well as from the Freie Universität in Berlin. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy. In 1996 he became only the second recipient of the American Oriental Society Medal of Merit, awarded for scholarship of sustained and outstanding quality.
May his memory be a blessing.
013
Case Closed
Russia to Keep Priam’s Treasure
In a peremptory attempt to end the century-long dispute over the ownership of Priam’s Treasure, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow has put the gold objects found by Heinrich Schliemann at Troy on “permanent display.”
In 1873 Schliemann smuggled the treasure out of Turkey into Athens. Seven years later, he presented it to Germany, the land of his birth, on the condition that “all the rooms in which it is exhibited bear my [Schliemann’s] name.” After World War II, the Russian army confiscated the treasure as war booty. Secretly stored away for 50 years, the treasure was finally put on temporary display at the Pushkin Museum in 1996—despite strong objections from Germany and Turkey, both of which countries claim Priam’s Treasure as their own. Then in July 1999, after a court ruled that Russian museums are not obliged to return confiscated art to “aggressor nations,” the director of the museum, Irina Antonova, stated publicly that Russia would keep the gold. (See the following articles in Archaeology Odyssey, July/August 1999: David Traill, “Priam’s Treasure,” and “An Odyssey Debate: Who Owns Priam’s Treasure?” AO 02:03)
013
What Do You Know About the Nabataeans?
1) Who were the Nabataeans?
a) an African people from Eritrea
b) the rulers of Egypt’s Old Kingdom
c) the inhabitants of Canaan
d) an ancient Arab tribe
2) The Nabataeans’ wealth and power stemmed from
a) military conquests
b) advancements in science and medicine
c) control of the perfume and spice trade
d) knowledge of navigation and seamanship
3) Much of our information about the Nabataeans comes from
a) Homer
b) the Greek historian Strabo
c) the Roman historian Pliny
d) the New Testament
4) In the fourth century B.C. the Nabataeans established what famous capital?
a) Petra
b) Xanadu
c) Shangri-la
d) Uruk
5) To reach Petra, ancient travelers had to
a) cross a great stone bridge
b) pass through a narrow mountain gorge
c) navigate through a dense forest
d) sail across a vast lake
6) During World War I, Petra served as a
a) training camp for the Ottoman army
b) munitions depot for the Germans
c) field hospital for the British
d) hideout for Lawrence of Arabia
7) In the 1989 film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Petra was used to depict the Canyon of the Crescent Moon—the imaginary resting place of what famous artifact?
a) the Holy Grail
b) the Shroud of Turin
c) the Code of Hammurabi
d) the Elfstone of Shannara
8) The building seen here is:
a) the Palace of Persepolis
b) the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
c) the New York Public Library
d) a rock-hewn building in Jordan
Answers
(1)d (2)c (3)b (4)a (5)b (6)d (7)a (8)d. This Hellenistic structure is often called the Treasury because it resembles government buildings. Like most of Petra’s rock-hewn structures, however, it was probably a temple or tomb. For more on the Nabataeans and Petra, see Joseph Basile, “When People Lived at Petra.”
Scholar, Teacher, Mensch
The Death of america’s foremost Hittitologist
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