William W. Hello

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William Wolfgang Hallo (born March 9, 1928 in Kassel ; † March 27, 2015 ) was an American ancient orientalist and professor of Assyriology and Babylonian literature at Yale University .

Life

William Hallo was born in 1928 as the second child of the art historian Rudolf Hallo (1896–1933) and the economist Gertrud Hallo, geb. Rubensohn, born in Kassel. His father, the first successor to Franz Rosenzweig in the management of the Free Jewish Teaching House in Frankfurt am Main and since the mid-1920s curator at the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Kassel, died in 1933. So it became more and more difficult for the mother in the National Socialist German Reich and bring the two children through. In 1939 she managed to emigrate to England in good time and in 1940 received a visa for the USA. William Hallo first came to Great Britain on one of the Kindertransporte , in which unaccompanied Jewish children could leave Nazi Germany.

After graduating from high school, William Hallo studied Middle Eastern languages ​​and literature at Harvard , Chicago and Leiden in the Netherlands. In 1955 he received his doctorate with the work Early Mesopotamian Royal Titles at the University of Chicago. From 1962 until his retirement in 2002 he taught Assyriology and Babylonian literature at Yale University and was curator of the Babylonian Collection there .

Act

William W. Hallo was one of the most internationally renowned representatives of ancient oriental studies. He succeeded in deciphering some important text finds from the earliest times of human written culture . Through his research on the languages ​​and cultures of Mesopotamia, he made a significant contribution to an overall cultural and historical interpretation of human history.

Another pioneering work by William W. Hallo was the translation of Franz Rosenzweig's main work The Star of Redemption into English (1971), in which his mother Gertrude Hallo also played an important role. In 1991 he took up the Franz Rosenzweig visiting professorship at the University of Kassel.

Honors

Fonts (selection)

  • The Ensi's of the Ur III Dynasty . University of Chicago Microfilm, 1953.
  • Early Mesopotamian Royal Titles: a Philologic and Historical Analysis . New Haven 1957.
  • Sumerian Archival Texts . Leiden 1963.
  • with JJA van Dijk: The Exaltation of Inanna . New Haven / London 1968.
  • The Star of Redemption, by Franz Rosenzweig . Translated from the Second Edition of 1930 by William W. Hallo, New York 1971.
  • with William Kelly Simpson: The Ancient Near East: a History . New York 1971.
  • with David B. Ruderman and Michael Stanislawski: Heritage: Civilization and the Jews, a source reader . New York 1984.
  • with Scott G. Beld and Piotr Michalowski: The Tablets of Ebla: Concordance and Bibliography . Winona Lake IN 1984.
  • The Book of the People. Brown Judaic Studies . Atlanta 1991.
  • Origins. The Ancient Near Eastern Background of Some Modern Western Institutions . Leiden / New York / Cologne 1996.
  • Search for the origins (an autobiographical sketch) . In: Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik (ed.): Visualizing the destroyed Jewish heritage. Franz Rosenzweig guest lectures Kassel 1987–1998 . Kassel 1997.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In Memoriam: William W. Hallo, expert on ancient Near East , YalesNews, Yale University Web site , March 30, 2015, accessed April 1, 2015.
  2. ↑ After the introduction to Hallo in an anthology of his works, see online via Google books , he fled in one of the Kindertransporte .
personal data
SURNAME Hello William W.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hello, Wilhelm Wolfgang
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American ancient orientalist
DATE OF BIRTH March 9, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH kassel
DATE OF DEATH March 27, 2015