Muazzez İlmiye Çığ

Muazzez İlmiye Çığ , born as Muazzez İlmiye İtil (born June 20, 1914 in Bursa ) is a Turkish sumerologist .

Biography and career

The the people of the Crimean Tatars belonging to ancestors of Muazzez Ilmiye ITIL had the Crimean leave and emigrated to Turkey; her father's family had settled in Merzifon , and her mother's in Bursa. Muazzez was born there just a few weeks before the outbreak of the First World War . Her parents first moved to İzmir and later, after Greek troops marched into İzmir on June 15, 1919, to Çorum .

In Çorum she attended elementary school, later in Bursa the private school Bizim Mektep , where she learned to play French and the violin . In 1926 she passed the entrance exam to the Bursa Kız Muallim Mektebi (teachers' school in Bursa). After graduating from this school in 1931, she was employed in Eskişehir , where her father also worked as a teacher. She practiced this profession for four and a half years in Bursa.

In line with the republican zeitgeist, the language, history and geography faculty of the University of Ankara , founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk , was specifically looking for female students. Muazzez Çığ applied in 1938 and got a place in the Department of Classical Studies. There she studied German, Hittitology and Sumerology with the German-Jewish scientists Hans Gustav Güterbock and Benno Landsberger , who had fled from the Third Reich . She graduated in 1940. At the same time she married Kemal Cığ (1913–1983), the director of the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul; she stayed with him throughout his life.

Sumerian clay tablet

At the Istanbul Archaeological Museum , she worked in Samuel Noah Kramer's team on the restoration and translation of 75,000 Sumerian clay tablets. In 1971 she retired. She remained active in the discipline and attended international sumerological congresses, translated "The story begins with Sumer" by Samuel Noah Kramer into Turkish and wrote a large number of popular scientific works for the Turkish readership.

Headscarf debate

As a historian, she put forward the thesis that the headscarf can be detected for the first time among the Sumerians. It was a dress code for temple whores among the Sumerians . This scientific thesis brought her in 2006 a lawsuit for spreading religious hostility (insulting Islam). The court acquitted her and concluded that her book did not stir up hostility in Turkey.