I. J. Gelb

Ignace Jay Gelb (October 14, 1907, Tarnau, Austria-Hungary (now Tarnów, Poland) - December 22, 1985, Chicago, Illinois) was a Polish-American ancient historian and Assyriologist who pioneered the scientific study of writing systems.

Born in Tarnów, Austria-Hungary (now Poland), he earned his PhD from the University of Rome in 1929, then went to the University of Chicago where he was a professor of Assyriology until his death.

Although writing systems have been studied for centuries by linguists, Gelb is widely regarded as the first scientific practitioner of the study of scripts, and coined the term grammatology to refer to the study of writing systems. In A Study of Writing (1952), he suggested that scripts evolve in a single direction, from logographic scripts to syllabaries to alphabets. This historical typology has been criticized as overly simplistic, forcing the data to fit the model and ignoring exceptional cases. Yet, despite more recent refinements of the typology by Peter T. Daniels and others, Gelb's rigorous study of the properties of different kinds of writing system was pioneering and innovative.

Gelb had contributed significantly to the decipherment of the Anatolian hieroglyphs (formerly often referred to as 'Hittite hieroglyphs'), having published 3 volumes of studies on the subject.

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