The Unknown Benno Landsberger: A Biographical Sketch of an Assyriological Altmeister's Development, Exile, and Personal Life /Bernard V. Bothmer, Egyptologist in the Making, 1912 through July 1946: With Bothmer s Own Account of His Escape from Central Europe in October 1941.

• Author: Beckman, Gary

The Unknown Benno Landsberger: A Biographical Sketch of an Assyriological Altmeister's Development, Exile, and Personal Life. By LUDEK VACIN. Leipziger Altorientalische Studien, vol. 10. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2018. Pp. xvi + 132, illus. [euro]39 (paper).

Bernard V. Bothmer, Egyptologist in the Making, 1912 through July 1946: With Bothmer s Own Account of His Escape from Central Europe in October 1941. By MARIANNE EATON-KRAUSS. Investgatio Orientis, vol. 3. MUnster: ZAPHON, 2019. Pp. 174, illus. [euro]59.

Two recent publications explore the early years of giants in the study of the languages and cultures of the ancient Near East--the cuneiformist Benno Landsberger and the Egyptologist Bernard Bothmer. While both volumes present interesting details of life in the Germanophone upper middle class--or in the case of the latter scholar, minor nobility--in Mitteleuropa during the first decades of the twentieth century, neither is really focused upon the scholarly work of the scholars.

The Unknown Benno Landsberger follows its subject from his birth in Habsburg Bohemia (in the contemporary Czech Republic) in 1890 through service in the KuK military during the First World War, student years and teaching at the University of Leipzig, and exile in Ankara (1936-1948), up to his call to the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago in 1948. We learn much more about the prosperous Jewish community from which Landsberger sprang than about his seminal contributions to the understanding of the Akkadian verbal system or to Sumerian lexicography. Nonetheless, there is a certain charm to the photos of family members presented here, including Landsberger's own baby picture, and excerpts from their correspondence, much of which is now deposited at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

My only reservations about the book concern, first, the author's attribution of Landsberger's engagement with ancient Mesopotamia to his revulsion at the facile denigration of the Hebrew Bible and Judaism by Friedrich Delitzsch and his followers in the Babel und Bibel controversy. I readily concede that the young Benno had an interest in this dispute--the newspaper clipping from his Nachlafi (pictured on p. 27, fig. 10) demonstrates this concern--but I doubt that this was a significant motivating factor in his choice of scholarly vocation.

In this regard, biographer Ludek Vacin writes: "Thus, it appears that B[enno] L[andsberger]'s Assyriological adventure began with...