Everything about Ignace Gelb totally explained
Ignace J. Gelb (October 14, 1907 – December 22,
1985) was a
Polish -
American ancient historian and
Assyriologist who pioneered the scientific study of
writing systems. Born in
Tarnow,
Austria-Hungary (now
Poland), he earned his
PhD from the
University of Rome in 1929, then went to the
University of Chicago where he was a professor of Assyriology until his death.
Although writing systems have been studied for centuries by
linguists, Gelb is widely regarded as the first scientific practitioner of the study of scripts, and coined the term
grammatology to refer to the study of writing systems. In
A Study of Writing (1952), he suggested that scripts evolve in a single direction, from
logographic scripts to
syllabaries to
alphabets. This historical
typology has been criticized as overly simplistic, forcing the data to fit the model and ignoring exceptional cases. Yet, despite more recent refinements of the typology by
Peter T. Daniels and others, Gelb's rigorous study of the properties of different kinds of writing system was pioneering and innovative. Gelb believed that the
Maya hieroglyphs didn't qualify as true writing capable of representing language, which has now been disproven following the
decipherment of the Maya script.
Gelb's work in Assyriology focused on publishing editions of
Akkadian texts and a grammar and dictionary of Old Akkadian. He began the Chicago
Assyrian Dictionary project in 1947 and remained as the editor of the project until his death. His other important works include works on
Mesopotamian land tenure and sales,
metrology, and other aspects of economic and social history.
He was a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the
Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, and in 1975 he was elected as a member of the prestigious
American Philosophical Society. Additionally, from 1965 to
1966 he was president of the
American Oriental Society.
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