Ignace Yellow

Ignace Jay Gelb (born October 14, 1907 in Tarnów , Poland , † December 22, 1985 in Chicago , Illinois ) was a Polish-American ancient orientalist from the University of Chicago.

Life

Yellow was born in Poland and attended school in his hometown of Tarnów from 1917 to 1925 . As a teenager, he enthusiastically read a novel by Mór Jókai on the search for the original home of the Hungarian people in Central Asia. After school, he went to Florence to study Renaissance art, but soon became interested in the Middle East and from 1926 studied Middle Eastern languages in Rome . After completing his doctorate in 1929, he went to the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago . In 1931 he defended the results of his research at a conference of orientalists in Leiden . In 1932 and 1935 he traveled to Turkey and visited places near the Yılankale crusader castle . He succeeded in documenting the Kötükale inscription, which, due to its location on a steep rock face, was inaccessible to previous explorers. In 1947 he became a professor and stayed at the institute until his retirement in 1980. He was a member a. a. the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1968), the American Philosophical Society (1975), the British Academy (1978) and the Accademia dei Lincei .

Act

Yellow has published over twenty books and 250 scientific articles. He worked on the deciphering of the Hittite hieroglyphs . In his book A Study of Writing (German under the title: From the cuneiform to the alphabet: Fundamentals of a written science ) he tried to establish grammatology , the science of writing as a scientific discipline. His theory of the monogenesis of writing and the letter writing as the logical end point of the development of writing is controversial.

Publications (selection)

Hittite Hieroglyphic Monuments (= Oriental Institute Publications. Volume 45). The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1939
From cuneiform to the alphabet: Basics of writing science. German Translated from d. American by Renate Voretzsch, Stuttgart, Kohlhammer 1958 (A Study of writing, the foundations of grammatology).

Web links

Literature by and about Ignace Gelb in the catalog of the German National Library
Literature by and about Ignace Gelb in the bibliographic database WorldCat
Interview with Ignace Gelb in the online archive of the Austrian Media Library

Individual evidence

↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ Ernst Doblhofer : The decipherment of ancient scripts and languages . 2nd Edition. No. 20415 . Reclam Verlag, Stuttgart 2016, ISBN 978-3-15-020415-3 , pp. 221 ff., 235 (first edition 1957 by Paul Neff, Vienna).

personal data
SURNAME	Yellow, Ignace
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Yellow, Ignace Jay (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Polish-American ancient orientalist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH	October 14, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH	Tarnow , Poland
DATE OF DEATH	December 22, 1985
Place of death	Chicago , Illinois

[:0-1] ↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ Ernst Doblhofer : The decipherment of ancient scripts and languages . 2nd Edition. No. 20415 . Reclam Verlag, Stuttgart 2016, ISBN 978-3-15-020415-3 , pp. 221 ff., 235 (first edition 1957 by Paul Neff, Vienna).