Field Notes

Scholar, Teacher, Mensch

The Death of america’s foremost Hittitologist

Hans Gustav Güterbock, 91, one of the most important cuneiform scholars and Hittitologists of the 20th century, died on March 29 at his home in Chicago.

Professor Güterbock was born in 1908 in Berlin. His mother was a novelist; his father, the secretary of a German archaeological society, encouraged him to take an interest in the ancient Near East. Güterbock studied at the universities of Berlin, Marburg and Leipzig, where he received his doctorate in Assyriology in 1933 for a dissertation on Hittite and Mesopotamian history. Being of Jewish extraction, he was prevented by Nazi racial laws from pursuing an academic career, so he left Germany to take a post at the newly founded Ankara University, where he was a professor of Hittitology from 1936 to 1948. In Ankara, along with his former teacher and fellow émigré Benno Landsberger, Güterbock trained the first generation of Turkish specialists in ancient Near Eastern languages. He was also involved in the planning and construction of the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in the Turkish capital.