Hilprecht, H.V. (Hermann Vollrat), 1859-1925

Hermann Vollrat Hilprecht was born in Germany on July 28, 1859. He attended the University of Leipzig where he studied theology, law, and Semitic Languates. Hilprecht received his Ph.D. in 1883, and emigrated to the United States three years later where he became oriental editor of the SUNDAY SCHOOL TIMES in Philadelphia. That same year he was appointed a lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Pennsylvania, later being appointed to the Clark research professorship of Assyriology and Comparative Semitic philology.

During the University sponsored excavataion of Nippur, in present day Iraq, Hilprecht served as epigrapher in 1888-1889, and took over as scientific director after John P. Peters left in 1895. Hilprecht's subsequent criticisms of other team members and claims of discovery led to controversy among Near Eastern scholars in America - labeled the Peters-Hilprecht Controversy. The University of Pennsylvania convened a judicatory committee to look into the allegations, and issued a report exhonerating Hilprecht. In response to the American Scholoarly communities backlash against him, Hilprecht published a response, THE SO-CALLED PETERS-HILPRECHT CONTROVERSY, in 1908.

In addition to his professorship, Hilprecht also was curator of the Babylonian section of the University Museum from 1887 - 1910. He left the University and the Museum in 1911 following a dispute over access to his office and cases while he was away. Following his resignation Hilprecht returned to Germany, where he remained during World War I. He came back to Philadelphia following the armistice and became a U. S. Citizen. He died in Philadelphia on March 19, 1925.

In 1887, the University of Pennsylvania agreed to sponsor an expedition to the Near East. The idea was conceived by Reverend John Punnett Peters, University of Pennsylvania Professor of Hebrew and already a fund-raiser for William Hayes Ward of New York who made a site survey in Babylonia in 1885. Peters raised interest among Philadelphia donors for an excavation project. Contributors to the Babylonian Exploration Fund eventually included Charles C. Harrison, the banker Edward W. Clark and his brother Clarence H. Clark, William West Frazier, Joseph D. Potts, Henry Charles Lea and William Pepper.

In January of 1889, the expedition party directed by Peters arrived in Nippur. Nippur was a pre-Biblical city-state located in the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. British archaeologists had done some preliminary work in the 1850s; Ward's report on the site during his 1885 survey indicated promising archaeological resources. Two members of the 1885 investigation joined the Museum party: John Henry Haynes, photographer and business manager, and Daniel Z. Noorian, interpreter and work foreman. Other members of the 1889 team included Herman Volrath Hilprecht, newly appointed Professor of Assyriology at the University of Pennsylvania, Perez Hastings Field, architect and engineer, and Robert Francis Harper of Yale, co-Assyriologist with Hilprecht. The first campaign ended in the spring of that year, due to difficulties from climatic conditions, sickness, and violent attacks by local inhabitants.

The excavations resumed in 1890, again from 1893 to 1896 and finally from 1898 to 1900. A fifth expedition was proposed but never realized. A rich tablet collection, a Sumerian temple, and city walls were excavated. Because Peters left the University, Haynes and Hilprecht took over as leaders after 1893. Unfortunately, a scholarly controversy arose over Hilprecht's acquisition and interpretation of the tablets, culminating in his resignation from the University of Pennsylvania in 1910. The museum did resume excavations in the 1940's jointly with the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and turned its rights to the site over to them in 1949.

Leon Legrain, Curator of the Babylonian Section from 1920 to 1948, organized the documents relating to Nippur in 1926. In a little less than a month, he numbered all the documents concerning the excavation and prepared a catalog describing each item. In 1978, a doctoral student from the University of Chicago, Diane Taylor, assembled all the Nippur documents, finding not only Legrain's original material, but adding papers collected from the estates of J. H. Haynes and others. She arranged the papers by expedition and thereunder by Legrain number. For convenience, the papers are now arranged chronologically with cross-references to the Legrain number. Items acquired by Diane Taylor, often duplicates, have been interfiled with the original material, but are identifiable because they carry no red Legrain number. For further details on Taylor's work, please refer to her notes in the Near East finding aid file.