Cross-Post: Dis Manibus Muhammed Dandamayev

Muhammad Dandamayev, the distinguished Russian Assyriologist and Achaemenid scholar, has died at the age of 88. He was startlingly multilingual (as he was born in Dagestan, even Russian was a second language for him) and untiring (the author of several books which required pouring through transcriptions of thousands of cuneiform tablets), and during the Soviet era built some of the few bridges between Russian and western European scholarship by having his works translated into French and English. Without his books and articles, it would be even harder for scholars without knowledge of Russian to learn what researchers in the Slavic countries are working on.

I suppose it is traditional at times like this to anoint his inscriptions with oil, but my photocopy of sixteen pages of The Culture and Social Institutions of Ancient Iran won’t survive that kind of treatment as well as good old diorite.

Further Reading:

• http://www.orientalstudies.ru/ s.v. Muhammad Abdulkadyrovich Dandamayev
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Dandamayev