Johann Strassmaier

Johann Nepomuk Strassmaier , SJ, also Strassmayer, (born May 15, 1846 in Hagnberg (Mitterfels) , Bavaria, † January 11, 1920 in London ) was a German ancient orientalist and science historian who was considered one of the leading Assyriologists of his time .

Strassmaier joined the Jesuit order in 1865 and attended the religious school in Maria Laach monastery . In 1872 he went to England, where he remained for the rest of his life, after completing his studies in 1878 he lived in the Order's house on Mount Street in London and worked on copying cuneiform texts in the British Museum . From 1881 to 1884 he was at the Jesuit College in Blijenbeek Castle in the Netherlands. He published an Assyrian dictionary ( alphabetical index , 6 volumes from 1882 to 1886, but without translation of the words) and Babylonian texts , most of which came from excavations in Sippar (1889 to 1897). In 1897 his work was interrupted by a kidney operation that he underwent in Germany and from which he never fully recovered.

He found and copied numerous texts of mathematical and astronomical content in the British Museum (most of which were not published at the time and which he mostly did not translate), which he made available to the astronomers Franz Xaver Kugler and Joseph Epping . Later, through Anton Deimel, they were also available to the Redemptorist Johann Schaumberger and then to Otto Neugebauer and Abraham Sachs .

Fonts

• with Josef Epping: Astronomical things from Babylon, or the knowledge of the Chaldeans about the starry sky , Freiburg, Herder 1889 Online
• Alphabetical index of the Assyrian and Akkadian words of the Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia Vol. II as well as other mostly unpublished inscriptions, with numerous additions and improvements , 6 volumes, Leipzig, Hinrichs 1882 to 1886

literature

• Wartner Franz: Act des Koenigl. District court Mitterfels 1850 regarding the training of the desert Hagnberg published in Mitterfelser Magazin 02/1996 Online

Web links

• Gary Thompson biography