Cyrus Gordon

Cyrus Herzl Gordon (June 29, 1908 – March 30, 2001) was an American scholar of Near Eastern cultures and ancient languages.

Gordon was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Lithuanian emigrant and physician Benjamin Gordon. He was raised in an upper class Jewish family with a particular emphasis on devotion to Jewish learning, rational thinking, as well as an openness to secular learning. As a scholar he made his primary contributions as one of the few great Semiticists to come out of the United States, and that was because he followed an education track typical of elite European philological scholars. That is, Gordon began studying Hebrew at age five and became interested in both Greek and Latin as a young child.

Gordon took his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, and also took courses at both nearby Gratz College and Dropsie College. These three institutions had specialized programs in the Bible, classics, and ancient Near East, all of which contributed to Gordon's historical-philological bent. At these universities, Gordon studied Old Persian and Sanskrit as well.

As an American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) fellow, Gordon spent the first half of the 1930s in the Near East working out of both the Baghdad and Jerusalem centers. Gordon dug with Leonard Woolley at Ur, and worked with Flinders Petrie at Tell el-'Ajjul. He worked with W. F. Albright at Tell Beit Mirsim, and accompanied Nelson Glueck on his explorations in Transjordan. He was involved in the examination and translation of the Egyptian Tell el-Amarna tablets while with the J.D.S. Pendlebury expedition.

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