Emil Forrer

Emil Orgetorix Gustav Forrer (also Emilio O. Forrer ; born February 19, 1894 in Strasbourg ; † January 10, 1986 in San Salvador ) was a Swiss Assyriologist , antiquarian and Hittite scientist .

biography

youth

Emil Forrer's father was Robert Forrer (1866-1947), a well-known prehistorian , art historian , numismatist and archaeologist , who was director of the Strasbourg Museum of Roman and Prehistoric Antiquities. Robert Forrer published numerous books that still have the character of a manual and was one of the most important representatives of his subject in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In this upper class milieu, Emil Forrer grew up as a third-born child with his siblings. At the local Protestant lyceum , he completed his school education in 1911 with the Abitur. There are some published references about his youth, which he summarizes as follows:

"As a result, all problems and methods of prehistoric research and archeology have become a matter of course for me early on (because of my father's work) ."

Studies and PhD

In 1912 he enrolled in Strasbourg for history , Egyptology and Assyriology . There he learned from numerous well-known scholars, such as Assyrian from Carl Frank , Egyptian from Wilhelm Spiegelberg , Arabic and Neupersian from Enno Littmann and Old Persian from Albert Thumb .

In the autumn of 1913, Forrer moved to Berlin at the age of 19 to study ancient oriental history with Eduard Meyer and Assyriology with Friedrich Delitzsch, and to do his doctorate there. Forrer was probably always interested in questions of the ethnology and geography of the ancient Orient , so that it only seems logical that he chose the topic of "The provincial division of the Assyrian Empire" for his dissertation in 1917.

Work on the clay tablets from Boghazköi

In 1917, after successfully completing his doctorate , it was Eduard Meyer who convinced the young Forrer to take a closer look at Hittite , as this still young discipline promised rich scientific results. Since Meyer maintained good contacts with the Berlin Museum and played an important role within the German Orient Society , this Forrer made his own work space available in the museum from 1917 and granted him access to the clay tablets from Boghazköi ( Hattuscha ). Forrer diligently worked his way through thousands of tables and fragments, creating very extensive scraps, which Eduard Meyer also liked to refer to. He also sorted the material for the first time. Forrer published the first results of this extensive study in 1919 in his essay "The Eight Languages ​​of Boghazköi Inscriptions", as well as in two further essays in 1921 and 1922.

In addition to Eduard Meyer, Otto Weber , who had been custodian at the Berlin Museum since 1912 and succeeded Delitzsch's director of the Museum's Near Eastern Department, was one of his initial sponsors . Meyer and Weber involved Forrer from 1920 onwards in the publication of the texts in the series "Cuneiform texts from Boghazköi", the fourth volume of which Forrer wrote. This period and the following years are among his most productive. In 1922 his list of symbols and his two volumes with the historical texts in romanization were published. These also gave those unfamiliar with the cuneiform script access to the texts. The much-discussed Aḫḫijawa essays were also important. In 1923 in particular, Forrer devoted himself to deciphering the hieroglyphic Luwian , which he called " tabal ".

Habilitation

After two failed attempts in 1921 in Munich and 1923 at Berlin's Friedrich Wilhelm University (not accepted his habilitation thesis was), habilitation Forrer be on 18 May 1925. "History of the Ancient Near East and non-Semitic cuneiform languages of the ancient Near East." Nothing is known about the habilitation today, but the topic of the habilitation thesis can be taken from a letter: “... since then I have been working on a book about the Arzaova and Lugga countries, Assuva and the Greeks based on the Boghazköi texts of which I am submitting the first self-contained part as a habilitation thesis. ”Later, an expanded version was self-published.

Research trip to Anatolia

In 1926, Forrer and the religious scholar Edmund Weigand undertook a research trip to Anatolia financed by private donations and by the German Orient Society . The trip had primarily archaeological objectives such as the localization of settlements from pre-Roman times.

Since Forrer remained without a permanent job even after his habilitation in 1925, the financial worries that, with the exception of a few exceptional years, would determine his entire life, began to make themselves felt. The Emergency Association of German Science supported Forrer temporarily with a lecturer scholarship .

Visiting professorships and research trips

In 1929 Forrer, who had written contact with James Henry Breasted (1865-1935), the founder of the Oriental Institute in Chicago , was appointed to a three-year visiting professor (associate professor) in Chicago. As part of this activity, he traveled to Crete to a. to study the Minoan clay tablets . Furthermore, he was sent to Paris in 1930 to study the cuneiform findings from Ras Shamra and to acquire a basic knowledge of the excavation methods in Megiddo . Forrer also traveled to Cyprus in the summer of 1930 in order to sound out a planned excavation there. Subsequently, in the autumn of 1930, he undertook a research trip to Asia Minor, which was aimed at “further clarifying the situation in the library town of Arinna ”. Finally, during his stay in Chicago, Forrer published his results on the Hittite hieroglyphs, which are still methodologically convincing today.

After his time in Chicago, Emil Forrer was invited in May / June 1933 by the Universities of Geneva and Lausanne to give ten lectures each on the "Origins of the Cultures, Peoples and Languages ​​of the Ancient Orient". These well-rewarded lecture series make it clear that Emil Forrer enjoyed a well-deserved appreciation, albeit more abroad.

For the winter semester 1933/34 (October – January) Forrer held a visiting professorship for Assyriology and Semitic Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and used this stay to travel extensively in the USA by car. There, for the first time, the Central American cultures, especially the Maya culture, became the focus of his scientific interest.

Immediately after his stay in Baltimore, Forrer was taken on as an "Expedition Advisor" on behalf of Bryn Mawr College , Pennsylvania, where he helped prepare a Cilicia expedition, in which he himself participated.

However, Forrer's career stagnated in the following years and he stayed afloat with teaching positions, lecturer grants and financial support from the Swiss embassy. An initially pronounced assumption of civil servant status by the National Socialist Reich Ministry for Science, Education and National Education as a lecturer at the Berlin University on December 11, 1939, was revoked on May 11, 1940 because Forrer refused to resign his Swiss citizenship despite having given him a promise .

During the war, Forrer held regular lectures in Berlin until the winter semester of 1944. In the chaos of war and in the battle for Berlin, Forrer stayed in his longtime residence, Erkner , as long as possible . In 1940/1941 he worked for the military-geographic department of the OKW on a secret project to create special maps for the use of armored weapons and produced military-geographic maps of the Middle East. How far he got involved with the Nazi scientific community emerges from a letter from the "Research Center Orient" to Otto Rössler of the Reich Security Main Office at the University of Tübingen on November 11, 1944.

As can be seen from a diary of his wife at the time, Dorothea Forrer-Haupt, Forrer sought the position of director of the Near Eastern Department of the Berlin Museum immediately after the end of the war. In June and July 1945 he prepared reports on the state of the inventory of the Near Eastern and Egyptian departments for a department of the Red Army and for the temporarily appointed directorate of the museum and drafted the future design and organization of the museum and its position in Berlin in a memorandum Scientific enterprise. Forrer's application for a position failed, however, due to resistance from the remaining directors of the museum.

Move to Switzerland

After this bitter disappointment and with no prospect of profitable employment, Forrer left Berlin in August 1945 with his eldest son and his wife in a convoy for “ Displaced Persons ” of the Swiss Red Cross towards Switzerland, but not without an American interrogation beforehand To have to endure the military. There Forrer had to explain why, as a Swiss citizen, he had stayed in National Socialist Germany until the end of the war.

Forrer found accommodation in Zurich after his departure and a stopover in an internment camp run by the Swiss Army . There he tried unsuccessfully for a corresponding position at the university there.

At this time, reading the ancient author Theopompus von Chios matured the idea that pursued him for the rest of his scientific life and which he called "Meropis Research". In his work " Philippika " Theopompos describes the dialogue between the mythical King Midas and a drunken Silenus ( FGrHist 115 F 75). Europe, Asia and Africa are islands that emerged from an ancient continent that he called Meropis . Forrer developed this idea into a theory and looked for scientific evidence of the earliest contacts between America and Europe.

Departure to America

In 1949, Forrer emigrated to Central America with his wife, disappointed with the scientific community in Europe. With the inheritance of his father Robert Forrer, who died in 1947, the two embarked for New York. Via Texas and Mexico, they traveled to Honduras , Guatemala and El Salvador to devote themselves to the study of Central American cultures. This led him briefly to the newly founded philosophical faculty of the University of San Salvador , where he accepted a position and made the archaeological development of the Comayagua valleys in Honduras his task. But this promising commitment was again undone by fundamental changes at the university. Forrer settled in El Salvador. However, life there increasingly turned into a tough struggle for the existence of the large family. Emil Forrer became a father seven more times in El Salvador. He worked u. a. as a freelance author for the daily newspaper Diario del Hoy and published more than 200 newspaper articles between 1949 and 1966. Most of them were popular scientific representations that ranged from volcanism and planetary constellations to a subway project for San Salvador.

Because of his knowledge of the older language levels of Spanish, he was commissioned by the Salvadoran Foreign Ministry in 1967 to search historical documents for arguments in the border dispute between El Salvador and Honduras. On this occasion, Mr. Earl H. Lubensky - at the time in the service of the American Embassy in El Salvador - met Emil Forrer and established closer contact with him. In 1984 he wrote a biography that has not yet been published and which contains new information, especially with regard to the period after 1949, i.e. the Central American period of Forrer's life. Forrer has also self-published a number of books in El Salvador that focus primarily on Meropis research and the cultural contacts between America and ancient Europe. Some of it has found its way to Europe through family contacts and is among other things. a. in the Swiss National Library . Emil Forrer died on January 10, 1986 at the age of 91 in San Salvador.

Correspondence and contacts

In his estate there are correspondence with almost all well-known ancient orientalists and cuneiform researchers who worked before the Second World War, but also with scientists from other disciplines, with whom Forrer apparently kept in close contact for many years. He corresponded u. a. with (in selection): William F. Albright , Helmuth Theodor Bossert , Wilhelm Brandenstein , James H. Breasted , Franz Dornseiff , Erich Ebeling , Hans Ehelolf , Johannes Friedrich , Albrecht Götze , Hans Gustav Güterbock , Oliver R. Gurney , Hans FK Günther , Bedřich Hrozný , Franz Köcher, Paul Koschaker, Paul Kretschmer, Ernest Lachmann , Carl Ferdinand Friedrich Lehmann-Haupt , Ernst Lewy, Oswald Menghin , Bruno Meissner , Piero Meriggi , Eduard Meyer , Max von Oppenheim , Hans-Henning von der Osten , Anton Poebel, Hans Reinerth , Fritz Schachermeyr , Ferdinand Sommer , Arthur Ungnad , Otto Weber , Ernst F. Weidner and Hans Zimmer .

The institutional contacts that can be proven by letters include a. the Oriental Institute in Chicago, the Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr Pennsylvania, the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the Collège de France , the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft , the Deutsche Orientgesellschaft , the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft , the Universities of Berlin, Zurich, Geneva , Neuchatel and Brussels, the Swiss Embassy in Berlin, the Turkish government and many more.

In addition, numerous correspondence with friends and acquaintances have been preserved, which on the one hand shed light on Emil Forrer's private life, on the other hand they contain information and explanations about Hittite-type projects or refer to travel experiences and research projects.

Forrer owned a "copy book" in which 902 letters from Emil Forrer's hand to numerous correspondents on thin parchment paper are preserved as copies of handwritten originals. These letters, especially those to his father Robert Forrer and to his first wife Margarete Sommer ("Gretl"), provide more in-depth insights into the early days of Hittiteology in the years 1917–1922 and about Forrer's path into this new discipline. Forrer describes the situation in the Berlin museum, where the Boghazköi tablets were kept and analyzed, and his collaboration with the German Orient Society in the early twenties. His academic situation, especially his doctorate and habilitation, and his close relationship with Eduard Meyer, his most important academic teacher and mentor, can also be easily followed on the basis of this material. To this end, the material in the archive of the Humboldt University Berlin supplements gaps in the letter material. Almost all official documents on the doctoral procedure can be found, for example the opening and notification of the procedure, submission of the doctoral thesis and the handwritten original reports from his academic teachers Eduard Meyer and Friedrich Delitzsch.

Bibliographical selection

• On the chronology of the Neo-Assyrian period , JC Hinrichs, Leipzig 1916
• The provincial division of the Assyrian Empire , JC Hinrichs, Leipzig 1920
• Cuneiform texts from Boghazköi , 4th issue, 1920
• Ḫajasa-Azzi. Caucasica 9, 1931, 1-24
• Homeric and Silenic America , self-published, San Salvador 1975

literature

• Johannes Renger : The history of ancient Near Eastern studies and Near Eastern archeology in Berlin from 1875 to 1945 , in: W. Arenhövel / C. Schreiber (ed.): Berlin and the ancient world. Architecture, applied arts, painting, sculpture, theater and science from the 16th century to the present day. German Archaeological Institute , Berlin 1979, pp. 151–192
• Robert Oberheid: Emil O. Forrer and the beginnings of Hittitology. A biography of the history of science , Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-11-019434-0

Web links

• Literature by and about Emil Forrer in the catalog of the German National Library

notes

1. ^ Robert Oberheid: Emil O. Forrer and the beginnings of Hittitology. A biography of the history of science. de Gruyter, Berlin 2007 ISBN 978-3-11-019434-0 p. 292 (also as an e-book). The creation of geographical deployment plans was an important task of RSHA Amt VIG, which jokingly called itself “Reichsstiftung für Länderkunde”, see p. 22 (PDF; 159 kB), item 19440600.