Archibald Sayce

The Rev. Archibald Henry Sayce (25 September 1845 – 4 February 1933), was a pioneer British Assyriologist and linguist, who held a chair as Professor of Assyriology at the University of Oxford from 1891 to 1919.

Archibald Sayce was born in Shirehampton, Bristol, to a family of Shropshire descent. A delicate child who suffered from tuberculosis and got a late start, he soon caught up with a private tutor and was reading Homer in Greek at ten. He attended The Queen's College, Oxford, becoming a fellow in 1869.

In 1874 Sayce published a long paper, "The Astronomy and Astrology of the Babylonians" in Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology vol. 3, part 1), with transcriptions and translations of the relevant cuneiform texts, that was one of the first articles to recognise and translate astronomical cuneiform texts.

In 1879 Rev. Sayce linked the reliefs near Magnesia on the Maeander in western Anatolia to those of the site at Yazilikaya in the Turkish plateau, and recognised that they belonged to an unidentified pre-Greek culture.

In 1876, he deciphered one of the hieroglyphics inscribed on stones at Hamath in Syria, by deducing that the profile of a man stood for "I". In 1880, he deciphered another hieroglyphic which he recognised as the governing prefix that identified divinity. He had suspected for some time that Boghazkoy was the capital of the Hittites because some hieroglyphic scripts found at Aleppo and Hamath in northern Syria were matched to the script on a monument at Boghazkoy.

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