Citizenship British Name Wilfred Lambert | Died November 9, 2011 Fields Assyriology | |
 | ||
Born 26 February 1926
Chudleigh Road, Erdington, Birmingham, United Kingdom ( 1926-02-26 ) Institutions Westminster School, London; University of Toronto; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore; Birmingham University; Ecole pratique des hautes etudes, Paris; British Museum Alma mater King Edward's School, Birmingham
Christ's College, Cambridge Books Babylonian Creation Myths Education Christ's College, Cambridge, King Edward's School, Birmingham | ||
Wilfred George Lambert FBA (26 February 1926 – 9 November 2011) was a historian and archaeologist, a specialist in Assyriology and Near Eastern Archaeology.
Contents
Early life
Lambert was born in Birmingham, and, having won a scholarship, he was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham. He obtained two degrees, in Classics and Oriental Languages, at Christ's College, University of Cambridge.
Academic career
Lambert taught and researched at the University of Birmingham for thirty years, during which period he made weekly trips to work on deciphering cuneiform tablets in the British Museum. After retirement he worked with the Museum on their Catalogue of the Western Asiatic Seals Project, dealing with the inscriptions on the seals. In January 2010 Professor Lambert and Dr Irving Finkel identified pieces from a cuneiform tablet that was inscribed with the same text as the Cyrus Cylinder.
Lambert was an external consultant for the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary. His work, 'Introduction: the transmission of the literary and scholarly texts', in Cuneiform Texts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art II: Literary and scholastic texts of the first millennium BC, was used as background material for The Higher Education Academy's project, Knowledge and Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire. He was also noted for his new discoveries in relation to the Gilgamesh text.
Personal life
Lambert was a Christadelphian, and a conscientious objector. From 1944 he worked in a horticultural nursery north of Birmingham in lieu of military service and supervised Italian prisoners of war in their work. Later, in his spare time, he was editor of one of his church's quarterly magazines.
Appointments and Memberships
Lambert was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1971. He was also a presenting member of the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale (International Congress of Assyriology and Near Eastern Archaeology).