Robert D. Biggs

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Robert D. Biggs

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Notes on the Career of an Assyriologist

One of the goals at enenuru, over and above the obvious focus on ancient history, is to study the field of Assyriology itself and those persons who excel in this lifestyle.. certainly there are few who succeed in this pursuit, and as there is no official guidebook, a little emulation is probably not a bad idea. I have always been impressed by the scholarship of Robert Biggs whose works I was already encountering back in my public library days and his interests, such as ancient medicine, incantation texts and Early Dynastic literature, have definitely impacted my own. So while flipping through the 2004 University of Chicago publication Studies Presented to Robert Biggs (eds. Martha T. Roth et al.), I was pleased to note an autobiographical chapter contributed by Biggs himself, in which he reflects on his long career in Assyriology. I will take notes below, largely paraphrasing the author, in the hopes of isolating some lessons for the student and private researcher.




Early years:


Biggs comes from a humble farming background in rural Washington. He developed an early interest in language learning, initially Danish (which one side of his family spoke) and later German, Spanish and Latin in high school. Upon entering college, Biggs had intentions of (perhaps) becoming a high school teacher of languages, and added French and Russian to his studies. He relates having to work for the Green Giant pea company in the summers, which goes to show, student summer jobs have always been a ton of fun!




Sparking of an interest:


At some point during his college years, Biggs began following up a childhood interest in Egypt and the Pyramids. Further, he read for the first time Edward Chiera's They Wrote on Clay (Chicago 1938). This served as his introduction to cuneiform and to Mesopotamia, whereupon he remembers being "fascinated by the thought of someone being able to read cuneiform and to read something that no one had read in thousands of years." Biggs then pursued further readings on this subject, hooked, but wondering whether it might be "foolish" to think of studying the ancient Near East seriously. At other times he drove a wheat truck and read French novels when parked.



Early Assyriological Studies:




Still in his early college years, Biggs was awarded a scholarship to study French at Toulouse, France, in the 1956/57 year. However, before long it was realized that his time there could be spent learning a variety of exotic languages taught at Toulouse, and Biggs enthusiastically took up the study of Hebrew, Arabic and even Akkadian. The young Biggs also expended (what seems like) an incredible amount of time walking Europe's highways and byways in various hitchhiking adventures (getting so far as Greece at one point!).


On returning to the U.S., Biggs enrolled in John Hopkins University where he had the chance to meet W.F. Albright (who had become something of a inspiration for Biggs). Albright was in his final year as chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Studies, but continued as a mentor after his retirement. In the 1959 year W.G. Lambert arrived from Toronto, where he had briefly lectured. Biggs studied under Lambert and, together with Kirk Grayson, a Toronto student who followed Lambert, was the only student seriously studying Assyriology at Hopkins that year.


Biggs developed his knowledge of Biblical Hebrew, Classical Arabic, Ugaritic, even Egyptian - Biggs states here: "The only one of these languages that I have followed up on or that has proved useful is Arabic..I can usualy get the gist of a radio news broadcast or a newspaper article in Modern Standard Arabic." Although he does articulate it here, that Biggs developed his Akkadian and Sumerian during this period may be inferred, as he next recounts the writing of his Ph.D. dissertation under Lambert, entitled SA3.ZI.GA: Ancient Mesopotamian Potency Incantations.



Early Career:



Receiving his Ph.D. in 1962, Biggs was initially interested in studying Sumerian incantation tablets in the Iraq Museum collection, and in late summer 1962 traveled by boat across the ocean. Subsequently, he took a train to Baghdad via the much acclaimed Orient Express, which for western novel readers, often evokes imagery from Agatha Christie novels. Not only was Biggs one of these readers, but seeing as it was 1962, he actually met Agatha Christie when she accompanied her husband (Mesopotamian archaeologist) Max Mallowan on a visit to the British School of Archaeology in Baghdad (where Biggs was staying at the time). Biggs has memories of Agatha Christie drinking tea, reading murder mysteries and knitting to pass the time in Baghdad, which is exactly what you would expect.

In 1963, Biggs visited Mosul and took an interest in some of the Christian monasteries in Assyria; he was particularly impressed by the Mar Behnam monastery, a truly ancient Christian monastery that continues in use today. Weighing on the modern Assyrian question, Biggs states here: "Especially in view of the very early establishment of Christianity in Assyria and it continuity to the present and the continuity of the population, I think there is every likelihood that ancient Assyrians are among the ancestors of modern Assyrians of the area."



The Discoveries at Abu Salabikh:



Sometime in 1963 Donald Hanson, long time excavator of Nippur under the Oriental Institute of Chicago, obtained a minimal funding to conduct a survey of site a few miles north of Nippur: the site, still known only by its modern name Abu Salabikh, "was littered with pottery of the Early Dynastic period." Biggs, who was already working with Hanson in a minor capacity at this point, was hired on as epigrapher. His description of camp conditions during this first excavation is a wonderful insight into the field conditions of the time:


"From the Nippur Expedition we had borrowed cots, mattresses, sheets, pots and pans, and dishes (the English-made set that had been used by the Oriental Institute in its excavations at Megiddo n Palestine in the 1930s.) We also borrowed their refrigerator, which operated by burning kerosene. Kerosene lamps provided our lighting. Some of these lamps used mantles... such lamps had to be pumped up constantly to maintain enough pressure to provide good light. The disadvantage of such light is that it attracts vast numbers of insects, making it a challenge to do much work at night by lamplight."


In the first few days of excavation, the team began finding cuneiform tablets from the Early Dynastic period, and then more and more. Within a very short time, Biggs was identifying geographic names mentioned in these texts and he identified the presence of literary texts - and already he was taking note of the names of Semitic scribes in the colophons of these texts. Biggs was the first scholar to notice this phenomena and to follow it up, leading to a new understanding of the presence of Semitic speakers and scribes in ED Sumer (See for example, Robert D. Biggs, “Semitic Names in the Fara Period,” Orientalia, 36 (1967): 55-66). This has forced scholars to recognize the bilingual nature of Mesopotamian society even from earliest periods. Subsequently, Biggs cataloged the many ED tablets discovered during the excavations at Abu Salabikh, spent years perfecting his line drawings of the tablets (a process involving several trips to the Iraq museum to compare his work with the original tablets) and eventually published this work in OIP 99 (1974).



Career work for the CAD:



It was also in 1963 that Biggs received his contracts to work for the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, a salaried job paying $5000 a year. Through a strategy of (staged?) flirtations with John Hopkins, Biggs quickly advanced his situation at Chicago acquiring partial tenure in 1964, and within several years, Associate Professor (with tenure). Biggs continued learning even at this point, and research associates were encouraged to sit in on classes, especially ones on Sumerian. Further:

" There was also a tradition of weekly reading sessions where we collectively read through newly published volumes of texts that had been published only in drawings of the cuneiform (a practice several of us continue, even in our retirement). It was partly an effort to document new occurrences of words that would be cited in future volumes of the Assyrian Dictionary but also, for us young Assyriologists, to develop our skills at reading a variety of genres of texts."


In the end, Biggs worked for the CAD for almost 50 years. The story of the completion of the 90 year CAD project can be found at the following link, which also contains highlights of Biggs' role in the project:

www.atour.com/education/20110605a.html

As Editor of JNES:



Biggs was appointed as editor of the Journal for Near Eastern Studies in 1971 and served this role until 2006.




Retirement:



In June 2004, Biggs officially retired, although he continued for a time with his activities for both JNES and CAD. Among his closing autobiograpahical remarks, he states: "I am truly grateful to the Oriental Institute and to the many friends, colleagues, and students who have made my long tenure here so professionally and personally rewarding. I hope that my contributions to accomplishing the mission of the Oriental Institute and to the field of Assyriology and the study of the ancient Near East in general justified the confidence shown by my appointment more than forty years ago."