Benno Landsberger
May 21, 2013 16:20:06 GMT -5
Post by us4-he2-gal2 on May 21, 2013 16:20:06 GMT -5
Thread orientation: On this thread I type a commemoration of Benno Landsberger, an incredibly Assyriologist worth remembering. Further his world famous and essential essay on the conceptual Babylonian world is summarized.
The following is a commemoration of Landsberger written in 1970 by Thorkild Jacobsen, one of Landsberger's students. I have chosen to post it in the Sumerologistics section as all students and enthusiasts should remember this important scholar:
"Benno Landsberger died in Chicago on the twenty-sixth of April, 1968, after a short illness. One of the greatest Assyriologists of all time, he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1959.
Landsberger was born April 21, 1890, in Friedeck in what was then Austrian Silesia. After finishing Gymnasium in Freideck he attended the University of Leipzig, where he studied under Heinreich Zimmern and the Arabist August Fischer. He obtained his doctor's degree in 1914 and published an enlarged form of his thesis in 1915, it was the still unsurpassed study, Der Kultische Kalender der Babylonier und Assyrer. In World War I, Landsberger served in the Austrian army on the eastern front. After the war he returned to Leipzig to teach. He became professor extraordinary in 1926, was called to the University of Marsburg in 1928 as successor to Peter Jenson, but returned to Leipzig in 1929 to succeed his teacher Zimmern who was retiring. The years in Leipzig were fruitful and productive years for Landsberger, who soon gathered around him a remarkable group of talented pupils. In 1935, however, he was dismissed from his position by the National Socialist Government of Germany and moved to Ankara in Turkey, where he accepted a professorship at University of Ankara. In 1948, finally, he was called to Chicago as professor in the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Here he taught until his retirement in 1955, but continued afterwards his research and work on the Assyrian Dictionary. His mind was clear and penetrating to the last, and one important article after the other flowed from his pen in a steady stream till very shortly before his death.
Landsberger was the acknowledged master in the field of Assyriology, unrivaled in knowledge and competence. Before all else, perhaps, he was the philologist, and as philologist specifically the lexicographer. His incredible memory laid to hand any and every text he had ever read, and he had read practically all of cuneiform literature. To this came the keenest insight and the highest standards of precision. He was a poet seeking the mot juste and rejecting anything less. His patience and perseverance when he was on the track of an elusive meaning were wonderful to watch. Guided by what he called "Fingerspitzengefuhl" he would gradually move closer to what the word could mean, constantly dissatisfied with approximations, critically aware of distance from the vaguely sensed truth, until at last -- sometimes, but by no means always-- there would come the moment of "Zugreifen." The clear, uncompromising, pregnantly concrete rendering was found.
Landsberger's forte was the concrete. He had an artist's sensitivity and ability to project himself into an ancient context and to sense what would have been said or felt or indicated, what the unknown word had to convey. Abstract structure held little appeal for him. He was himself aware of the fact that his particular genius did not run to the writing of books, but to articles: and even in his articles the joy and enlightenment are likely to come from a succession of brilliant specific insights rather than from the overarching problem and structuring of the investigation. It is characteristic that he won his spurs in a series of reviews for which the structure was in a sense given with the book under review, but which so brilliantly and decisively advanced the book's subject as almost to dwarf it. The Assyrian dialect was lucidly analyzed and presented in two reviews of books by Julius Lewy; a review of Ungnad's Babylonische Briefe signally improved upon a book which in itself was a masterpiece; the review of Gadd and Legrain, Ur Excavations I, did more to elucidate the texts and their historical context than long books could have done.
Landsberger's ability to project himself sensitively into a given situation governed by forms and values of a culture so removed in time and place from ours as is ancient Mesopotamian culture was at the core of his rebellion against the state of Assyriology as he found it - as handmaiden to Old Testament studies, determined in setting and solving of problems by the aim of throwing light on Old Testament data. Landsberger's programmatic article of 1926 "Die Eigenbegrifflichkeit der Babylonischen Welt" (Islamica 2: pp. 355-372) insisted on the necessity of studying Mesopotamian culture for its own sake, in its own terms, and within its own system of values. Under the banner of "Eigenbegrifflichkeit" Landsberger and his students may be said to have made Assyriology for the first time an autonomous discipline.
Central to Landsberger's interest was in those years Akkadian grammar, which he analyzed with power and imagination. Fortunately, most of his results have now been made available by his pupil von Soden in the latter's great Grundriss der Akkadischen Grammatik. For many years, surviving in private lecture notes circulating among scholars, they constituted an exciting, but tantalizing, secret lore only."
Benno Landsberger
The following is a commemoration of Landsberger written in 1970 by Thorkild Jacobsen, one of Landsberger's students. I have chosen to post it in the Sumerologistics section as all students and enthusiasts should remember this important scholar:
"Benno Landsberger died in Chicago on the twenty-sixth of April, 1968, after a short illness. One of the greatest Assyriologists of all time, he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1959.
Landsberger was born April 21, 1890, in Friedeck in what was then Austrian Silesia. After finishing Gymnasium in Freideck he attended the University of Leipzig, where he studied under Heinreich Zimmern and the Arabist August Fischer. He obtained his doctor's degree in 1914 and published an enlarged form of his thesis in 1915, it was the still unsurpassed study, Der Kultische Kalender der Babylonier und Assyrer. In World War I, Landsberger served in the Austrian army on the eastern front. After the war he returned to Leipzig to teach. He became professor extraordinary in 1926, was called to the University of Marsburg in 1928 as successor to Peter Jenson, but returned to Leipzig in 1929 to succeed his teacher Zimmern who was retiring. The years in Leipzig were fruitful and productive years for Landsberger, who soon gathered around him a remarkable group of talented pupils. In 1935, however, he was dismissed from his position by the National Socialist Government of Germany and moved to Ankara in Turkey, where he accepted a professorship at University of Ankara. In 1948, finally, he was called to Chicago as professor in the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Here he taught until his retirement in 1955, but continued afterwards his research and work on the Assyrian Dictionary. His mind was clear and penetrating to the last, and one important article after the other flowed from his pen in a steady stream till very shortly before his death.
Landsberger was the acknowledged master in the field of Assyriology, unrivaled in knowledge and competence. Before all else, perhaps, he was the philologist, and as philologist specifically the lexicographer. His incredible memory laid to hand any and every text he had ever read, and he had read practically all of cuneiform literature. To this came the keenest insight and the highest standards of precision. He was a poet seeking the mot juste and rejecting anything less. His patience and perseverance when he was on the track of an elusive meaning were wonderful to watch. Guided by what he called "Fingerspitzengefuhl" he would gradually move closer to what the word could mean, constantly dissatisfied with approximations, critically aware of distance from the vaguely sensed truth, until at last -- sometimes, but by no means always-- there would come the moment of "Zugreifen." The clear, uncompromising, pregnantly concrete rendering was found.
Landsberger's forte was the concrete. He had an artist's sensitivity and ability to project himself into an ancient context and to sense what would have been said or felt or indicated, what the unknown word had to convey. Abstract structure held little appeal for him. He was himself aware of the fact that his particular genius did not run to the writing of books, but to articles: and even in his articles the joy and enlightenment are likely to come from a succession of brilliant specific insights rather than from the overarching problem and structuring of the investigation. It is characteristic that he won his spurs in a series of reviews for which the structure was in a sense given with the book under review, but which so brilliantly and decisively advanced the book's subject as almost to dwarf it. The Assyrian dialect was lucidly analyzed and presented in two reviews of books by Julius Lewy; a review of Ungnad's Babylonische Briefe signally improved upon a book which in itself was a masterpiece; the review of Gadd and Legrain, Ur Excavations I, did more to elucidate the texts and their historical context than long books could have done.
Landsberger's ability to project himself sensitively into a given situation governed by forms and values of a culture so removed in time and place from ours as is ancient Mesopotamian culture was at the core of his rebellion against the state of Assyriology as he found it - as handmaiden to Old Testament studies, determined in setting and solving of problems by the aim of throwing light on Old Testament data. Landsberger's programmatic article of 1926 "Die Eigenbegrifflichkeit der Babylonischen Welt" (Islamica 2: pp. 355-372) insisted on the necessity of studying Mesopotamian culture for its own sake, in its own terms, and within its own system of values. Under the banner of "Eigenbegrifflichkeit" Landsberger and his students may be said to have made Assyriology for the first time an autonomous discipline.
Central to Landsberger's interest was in those years Akkadian grammar, which he analyzed with power and imagination. Fortunately, most of his results have now been made available by his pupil von Soden in the latter's great Grundriss der Akkadischen Grammatik. For many years, surviving in private lecture notes circulating among scholars, they constituted an exciting, but tantalizing, secret lore only."