Explorations in Bible lands during the 19th century - H. V. Hilprecht

280 EXPLOBATIONS IN BIBLE LANDS
GERMAN EXCAVATIONS AT SURGHUL AND EL-HIBBA, UNDER
MORITZ AND KOLDEWEY
Long after English and French pioneers had established
and considerably developed the science of Assyriology, German
scholars began to remember their obligations towards a
discipline the seed of which was sown in the land of Grotefend,
and to occupy themselves seriously with those farreaching
researches which later were to find their strongest
representation at their own universities. The first Assyrian
courses delivered in Germany were given privately 1
at Jena,
where Eberhard Schrader, appropriately called the father of
German Assyriology, defended its principles and applied its
results to the elucidation of the Old Testament Scriptures.
His careful and critical examination of all that had been accomplished
in the past, and his successful repelling of Alfred
von Gutschmid's violent attack upon the very foundations
of Assvrian deciphering, were the beginning of a great movement
which soon led to the establishment of the Leipzig
school of Assyriologists under Friedrich Delitzsch, and to
the subsequent consolidation of the whole science by him
and his pupils. The old loose and unsatisfactory manner
of dealing with philological problems, to a large extent responsible
for the discredit in which Assyriological publications
were held in Germany, was abandoned, and exact
methods and a technical treatment of grammar and lexicography
became the order of the day.
Theories proclaimed
and accepted as facts had to be modified or radically changed,
and the interpretation of Assyrian and Sumerian
inscriptions was placed upon a new basis.
cuneiform
Problems partly or entirely unknown to the older school
1
According to direct information received from Professor Schrader, of Berlin,
by letter, these courses were given in the summer of 1873, when Friedrich
Delitzsch attended his lectures on Genesis at the university, while at the
same time he was introduced privately by him into the study of Assyrian.