Emit O. Forrer und die Anfange der Hethitologie: Eine wissenschaftshistorische Biografie.

• Author: Beckman, Gary
• Position: Book review

Emit O. Forrer und die Anfange der Hethitologie: Eine wissenschaftshistorische Biografie. By ROBERT OBERHEID. BERLIN: WALTER DE GRUYTER, 2007. Pp. xvii + 458, illus. CD. [euro]110.28.

As a student of Hittitology in Bochum during the 1980s, Robert Oberheid became captivated with the history of the field, and he later developed a website presenting capsule biographies--and photos--of a number of Hittitologists (http: //www.hethitologie.de/Biografien.html). Among the pioneers, he found the figure of Emil Orgetorix Forrer particularly intriguing. Beginning with Die acht Sprachen der Boghazkoi-Inschriften in 1920, this scholar published widely through the 1930s, only to disappear from the world of cuneiform studies before contributing a final, idiosyncratic, essay to Ugaritica VI in 1969. What had Forrer been up to in the intervening three decades?

In a fascinating foreword (pp. v-xiv), Oberheid explains how he made contact with the eldest of Forrer's many children and was unexpectedly given access to a trove of the scholar's papers that had been deposited in a Berlin warehouse during the final days of World War II, to be discovered and passed on to his descendants only in 1988, two years after the master's death in distant San Salvador. These documents, which include Forrer's academic records as well as copies of over 900 letters written between 1916 and 1922, form the basis of this biography. The most important fifty-six items have been reproduced and included on the accompanying CD.

Emil Forrer had the good fortune to be a Germanophone Swiss citizen at the time of the Great War, during which most of his contemporaries were called to the colors of Germany or Austria-Hungary. After completing his dissertation on Neo-Assyrian geography in Berlin in spring 1917, on the advice of his Doktorvater Eduard Meyer, Forrer accepted a position in the Vorderasiatische Abteilung of thenational museum, processing tablets and fragments from Hugo Winckler's recent excavations at the Hittite capital. He entered this employment with the expectation that he would soon rise to the top of the new field of Hittitology (p. 32; cf. p. 132). In this he was not disappointed, for his uninterrupted access to the textual material allowed him to produce some of the major works of the infant discipline, including a volume of hand copies (KBo 4, 1920), a compilation of transliterations of historical sources (Die Boghazkoi-Texte in Umschrift, 1-2, 1922, 1926), and the...