Hilprecht, Hermann Volrath

Hilprecht, Hermann Volrath

(hĕr`män fôl`rät hĭl`prĕkht), 1859–1925, American Assyriologist, b. Germany; Ph.D. Univ. of Leipzig, 1883. He is noted as an authority on cuneiform writing. Hilprecht went to the United States in 1886 and was professor of Assyriology (1886–1911) at the Univ. of Pennsylvania and curator (1887–1911) of the Semitic Dept. of its museum. He was scientific director of four expeditions (1895–1914) to Nippur, present-day Iraq, where he oversaw the excavation of thousands of Sumerian historical and literary texts from the Temple of the Wind God. He also reorganized (1893–1909) the Babylonian collection of the Imperial Ottoman Museum, Constantinople. Retiring to Germany in 1914, Hilprecht later returned to the United States and became a citizen.