Akademik

(1825–1905)

   German-born scholar who began by studying law at Heidelberg before he switched to oriental studies at Bonn, working on Old Persian grammar and texts. In 1848 he moved to France and joined a French government–sponsored expedition to the Middle East to explore Median and Mesopotamian sites (1851–1854), where he identified the site of Babylon. He taught Sanskrit and comparative philology and, from 1860, Assyriology at the College de France, where he was made professor in 1874. He published a grammar of Assyrian in 1868, and he identified that Sumerian was the hitherto unknown language used in cuneiform tablets and argued that this writing system was a Sumerian invention (Etudes sumeriennes, 1876). He published numerous Akkadian tablets of various content, and pioneered the study of astronomic and astrological texts.