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December 21, 2007
To Jean Bottéro and Lawrence Toombs
Jean Bottéro died last Saturday, December 15, 2007. He was born in 1914. Bottéro was a leading Assyriologist who took unabashed delight in his craft. In his essay "In Defense of a Useless Science" Bottéro wrote,
For a long time a double "miracle" (in any case, miracles are always suspicious) has prevented historians from going on this road of return to our origins: the image of the Bible, "the oldest book on earth," written by God and bestowed upon men in order to give a definitive answer to all their questions; and the famous "Greek miracle" which implicitly presupposes before the Greeks a universe of primates that had barely come down from their trees or nervously left their caves. No historian worth of that title in its real sense, should see absolute beginnings either in the Bible or with the Greeks - only two great steps on a road that goes much farther, much earlier, and ends only between the Tigris and the Euphrates, right before the uncertainties, the twilight, and then the increasing darkness of prehistory.This is why I have renounced assigning to Assyriology a total uselessness, which would in my opinion have amounted to recognizing in it an indisputable independence and preeminence. Since I have practiced the discipline and I have obtained an idea of all that it can bring to us, I have learned to consider it to be not only useful, but (objectively!) as indispensable for a correct and global understanding of our own history. Assyriology is not simply an enrichment of the mind. It should not have as its final goal our own pleasure and grandeur in discovery and learning. It is at our disposal to provide us with our oldest family of documents, if we want to consult them. It is there to crown our past, to inaugurate our origins, and to lead us to the primal source of that enormous stream which sill carries us.
I never met Bottéro but I have profited greatly from his work. Charles Halton at Awilum has more.
Lawrence Edmund Toombs died on Friday, December 14, 2007. I can't say that I knew Toombs. I did meet him several times in Israel during the very early 1970s and was left with a very favorable impression. When I first met him, Toombs was an outstanding field archaeologist working at Tel Hesi with my Hebrew teacher John Worrell. Stephen Cook at Biblische Ausbildung has all the details and you can find an obituary at The Record.
Reference:
Posted by Duane Smith at December 21, 2007 7:41 PM | Read more on Akkadian |
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