Edith Porada

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Edith Porada (born August 22, 1912 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary ; died March 24, 1994 in Honolulu ) was an Austrian-American ancient Orientalist and Near Eastern archaeologist. She was a leading expert on cylinder seals and glyptics .

Life

Edith Porada came from a wealthy family - she was the daughter of the originating from Krakow industrialist Alfred Rappaport Edler von Porada (1876-1962) and Käthe Magnus (Marriage 1911 in Berlin) - and was privately in Vienna and on the family estate at Mariazell educated . She went to the Luithlen private girls' college in Vienna (Abitur 1930) and studied oriental studies and archeology of the Middle East at the University of Vienna . Her teachers included Josef Strzygowski , the ethnologist Robert Heine-Geldern and the sumerologist Viktor Christian . In 1935 she received her doctorate under Wilhelm Czermak and Fritz Wilke on old Akkadian glyptics (cylinder seals from the time from 2340 to 2180 BC from Berlin museums). On the advice of Leo Oppenheim , she studied at the Louvre cylinder seal and wanted to take part in Hetty Goldman's excavations in Tarsos , but did not get a visa for Turkey. After the " Anschluss of Austria " , the situation became dangerous for Jews (their father was baptized as a Protestant, but of Jewish descent). In 1938 she fled with her sister via France to New York, where she studied with a research grant from the American Philosophical Society at the Metropolitan Museum of Art seals of Aššur-nâṣir-apli II from the collection of Luigi Palma di Cesnola and Assyrian wall reliefs. In 1944 she became a US citizen and in 1944/45 she was employed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1947 she published a monograph on the cylinder seals of the Pierpont Morgan Library and in 1949 she became a lecturer at New York University .

After she was a Guggenheim Fellow in Iran , she turned to ancient oriental art history and taught from 1950 as an assistant professor at Queens College in Brooklyn in the Faculty of Art History. In 1958, at the invitation of Rudolf Wittkower , she went to Columbia University as assistant professor of archeology , where she held seminars on cylinder seals at the Pierpont Morgan Library, of which she was made honorary curator for cylinder seals and cuneiform tablets in 1956. In 1962 she became an Associate Professor and in 1963 she was given a full professorship at Columbia University, from 1973 as Arthur Lehman Professor . In 1966 she founded the Department of Archeology of the Eastern Mediterranean, Eastern Europe and the Middle East at the university. In 1984 she retired, but remained active in research and seminars until 1993 (she even gave her last seminar to two students who had followed her to Honolulu on their deathbed).

Her main work is the corpus of the ancient oriental collection of seals of the Pierpont-Morgan Library with precise photographic documentation. The seals are important sources for the ancient Mesopotamian cultures and Porada examined their style, the iconography and the statements that could be made from them for the social and cultural environment of that time. She was particularly interested in the depictions of demons and mythical creatures, which was also the title of a commemorative publication dedicated to her. Later she also became an expert on ancient Iran, wrote a book about it and examined, for example, the reliefs in Persepolis . 1968 and 1970 to 1973 she led the excavations of the university in northeastern Cyprus. In doing so, she discovered a lead weight that showed the close trade links between Cyprus and the Greek islands in the late Bronze Age.

In 1976 she received the gold medal of the Archaeological Institute of America and in 1988 she became Cavalli d'oro di San Marco of the Center for Studies and Research on Oriental Civilizations in Venice. In 1989 she received an honorary doctorate from Columbia University. In 1983, an endowed professorship for arts and archeology of the Middle East named after her was established at Columbia University on the basis of an anonymous donation of 1 million dollars.

She lived with her father and with her friend, socialite Adeline Hathaway "Happy" Weekes Scully (died 1979).

Honors

She was a member of the American Philosophical Society , the German Archaeological Institute , the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1969), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , the Austrian Academy of Sciences (1980) and the British Academy (1977).

Fonts

  • Old Iran: art in pre-Islamic times , art of the world , Baden-Baden: Holle, 1962
    • English edition: The Art of Ancient Iran; Pre-Islamic Cultures . New York: Crown Publishers, 1965
  • Mesopotamian Art in Cylinder Seals of the Pierpont Morgan Library . New York: Morgan Library, 1947.
  • With Briggs Buchanan: The Collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library 2 volumes, Corpus of Ancient Near Eastern Seals in North American Collections, Volume 1, 1948
  • Seal Impressions of Nuzi , The Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 24, 1947
  • Editor and introduction to: Ancient Art in Seals: essays by Pierre Amiet, Nimet Ozgüc, and John Boardman , Princeton University Press 1980
  • Man and Images in the Ancient Near East , Wakefield, Rhode Island: Moyer Bell, 1995
  • With Susan Hare The Great King, King of Assyria: Assyrian Reliefs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art , New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1945 (museum catalog)

literature

  • Erika Bleibtreu:  Porada, Edith. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 20, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-428-00201-6 , p. 633 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Ann E. Farkas, Prudence O. Harper, Evelyn B. Harrison (Eds.): Monsters and Demons in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds. Papers Presented in Honor of Edith Porada . Von Zabern, Mainz 1987
  • Thomas Lawton: Dr. Edith Porada August 22, 1912-March 24, 1994. In: Artibus Asiae , Volume 54, 1994, pp. 376-377
  • Holly Pittman: Edith Porada, 1912-1994. In: American Journal of Archeology , Volume 99, 1995, pp. 143-146
  • Sabine Plakolm-Forsthuber: Edith Porada. In: Brigitta Keintzel, Ilse Korotin (ed.): Scientists in and from Austria. Life - work - work. Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-205-99467-1 , pp. 594–597.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Brigitta Keintzel, Ilse Korotin (ed.): Scientists in and from Austria. Life - work - work. Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-205-99467-1 , p. 594.
  2. ^ American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Book of Members ( PDF ). Retrieved April 21, 2016