Wolfram von Soden

Born in Berlin, Wolfram von Soden was a student of the ancient Semitic languages who studied under the Jewish Assyriologist, Benno Landsberger at Leipzig. He received his doctorate in 1931 at age 23 with his thesis Der hymnisch-epische Dialekt des Akkadischen (The Hymnic-Epic Dialect of Akkadian). In 1936, he was appointed a professor of Assyriology and Arabic studies, a new position at the University of Göttingen. When his mentor, Landsberger, was forced to leave Germany due to National-Socialist racial policy, von Soden joined the Sturmabteilung in 1934. He was a fervent German nationalist.[1] He joined the NSDAP in 1937[2]

From 1939 to 1945, von Soden served in the military, primarily as a translator, and in 1940 this work prevented him accepting the offer of a chair in Ancient Near Eastern studies at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. Von Soden published works that implicitly supported Nazi cultural and racial policy.

Following the Second World War, von Soden's former activities as an involuntary member of the Nazi Party initially barred his reentry to the teaching profession. Because of his extraordinary abilities, however, and thanks to his Doktorvater, Benno Landsberger, who wrote in his support, von Soden was appointed to an academic position at the University of Vienna in 1954. In 1961, he accepted the offer of a professorship at Münster, where he served as director of the Oriental Seminar until his retirement in 1976. At his death in 1996, he left his scholarly library to the newly revived Institute for Near Eastern Studies at the University of Leipzig, where he had earned his doctorate.

After World War II, von Soden became a prominent scholar in the world in ancient Semitic languages, and his scholarship greatly influenced his field the post World War II era. He was an integral member of the "history of religions" (Religionsgeschichte) school at Goettingen, and disproved the long-standing claim that the Babylonians had believed in their creator god, Marduk, as a "dying, rising god". Instead, he was able to show that the texts that purveyed this view were polemical Assyrian works deriding the chief god of their chief rival state. Von Soden's philological works, particularly the Akkadisches Handwörterbuch (AHW), in which the Dutch scholar Rykle Borger assisted, laid the basis for the detailed philological contributions that later appeared in the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary. His Grundriss Akkadischer Grammatik (GAG) and the AHW remain the definitive foundational works of Assyriology today and establish von Soden as the dean of ancient Near Eastern Studies in the world.

His work has been alleged to promote the Nazi ideology. His early works, especially 'Der Aufstieg des Assyrreiches als geschichtliches Problem' from 1937, do promote "racist concepts of Aryan superiority" over the influence of Semitic culture.[3] Another example is 'Leistung und Grenze sumerischer und babylonischer Wissenschaft' (1936). In the 1965 edition, page 122, the conclusion is: “daß Wissenschaft im strengen Sinn des Wortes nur unter den bei den indogermanischen Griechen und Indern gegebenen besonderen Voraussetzungen Gestalt gewinnen konnte”. In the 1936 edition, page 556, the conclusion is: “daß Wissenschaft im strengen Sinn des Wortes etwas ist, das nur von den durch die nordischen Rasse bestimmten Indogermanen geschaffen werden konnte”.[4] His Einführung in die Altorientalistik (1985) also contains an obsession with skincolour: "über die vermutlich immer hellhäutigen Bewohner Vorderasiens während der Kupfersteinzeit" (p. 14).

• Das akkadische Syllabar (1948, rev. 1967, 1976, 1991, ISBN 88-7653-257-9)
• Grundriss der akkadischen Grammatik (1952, ISBN 88-7653-258-7)
• Das Gilgamesch-Epos (1958, with Albert Schott; ISBN 3-15-007235-2)
• Akkadisches Handwörterbuch (1965–1981, 3 vols; ISBN 3-447-01471-7)
• Das akkadisch-hethitische Vokabular KBo I 44+KBo XIII 1 (1968, with Heinrich Otten)
• Einführung in die Altorientalistik (1985; ISBN 0-8028-0142-0); translated (by Donald G. Schley) into English as The Ancient Orient: An Introduction to the Study of the Ancient Near East. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994.

• Rykle Borger, "Wolfram von Soden". In: Archiv für Orientforschung 44/45, 1997/98, pp. 588–594.
• Gary Beckman, "von Soden, Wolfram (1908-1996). In 'The Encyclopedia of Ancient History' 2018, pp.1.
• Jakob Flygare, "Assyriology in Nazi Germany: the Case of Wolfram von Soden." In 'Perspectives on the History of Ancient Near Eastern Studies.' 2020, p. 44-60. ISBN 978-1-57506-836-7