William Foxwell Albright (1891-1971) was the most influential scholar of ancient and late antique Near Eastern studies in the 20th century, if not ever. (Cyrus Gordon, though remarkably productive and influential in his own right, remains in my mind a distant second.) This is a truism that many scholars, for whatever their personal reasons, are wont to refuse in the modern intellectual climate. (I suspect the two main reasons for their hesitation to admit such an obvious statement are grounded in ideological discomfort and ego dynamics.) The sheer quality and quantity of his work, the assessment of him by his peers and biographers, as well as the way he trained an entire generation of leading scholars in the field bear out this claim. Consider just a few examples:
John Bright wrote of him, “Professor Albright’s interests and competence extended over such broad areas, and his output was so prolific, that no one of his students is in a position to evaluate his contribution as a whole. I have been asked to comment upon his work as an historical and Biblical scholar. Yet even in this relatively restricted area—the area in which I was best able to follow him and learn from him—I feel myself almost totally at a loss, so wide-ranging were his interests, and so many-sided his contributions. One scarcely knows where to begin, or what to single out from such a mass of scholarly productivity.”
Edward F. Campbell, Jr. said of him, “His association with the American Philosophical Society, and his election to the National Academy of Sciences (in the Anthropology section!) are simply further indications of the breadth within which he sought to operate. But the breadth was not at the expense of meticulous attention to detail, of assiduous assembly of data, nor of careful recognition of the provisional nature of his conclusions. If it is becoming to a scholar to state plainly when he has been wrong and to move ahead to newly won positions based on the latest finds, no scholar of this generation has surpassed Dr. Albright in this virtue.”
In the opinion of Frank Moore Cross, “The student who attempts to write a tribute to William Foxwell Albright undertakes a dangerous task. I know of no student of Albright’s who does not hold him in great affection, and love may impede objective evaluation. The reverse also may be true; we may be too close to him to perceive his real stature. One thing is certainly true: no student of William Albright has the scholarly scope to evaluate all his contributions. This brings us to a first and obvious aspect of Albright’s scholarship: its breadth and its rigor.”
David Noel Freedman reminds us of his many achievements and accolades beyond his publications: “William Albright was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1929 and was an active member for forty-two years… He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences, and honorary or corresponding member of academies and learned societies in a dozen foreign countries. He was showered with honorary doctorates from more than twenty-five universities, including Utrecht (Th.D., 1936), Oslo (Th.D., 1946), St. Andrews (L.H.D., 1949), Yale (Litt.D., 1951), Uppsala (Th.D., 1952), Dublin (Litt.D., 1953), Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Dr.Phil., 1957), and Harvard University (1962)… Albright served as president of the Palestinian Exploration Society (1921-1922; 1934-1935), the American Oriental Society (1935-1936, The Society of Biblical Literature (1938-1939), and the International Organization of Old Testament Scholars (1956-1957)… Among the other honors which came richly to Albright in his years of retirement, two may be singled out for mention: the receipt in 1960 of the American Council of Learned Societies Award for Distinguished Scholarship in the Humanities, and in 1969 the award of the title Yaqqir Yérusalayim, ‘Notable of Jerusalem’ when he visited Israel in what proved to be a final triumphal tour.” We can add to this the fact that, in 1970, the American Schools of Oriental Research (founded in 1900) was renamed after its most prestigious and productive director and still today bears the title of the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research (AIAR) after a half century.
For Donald J. Wiseman, “The secret of Albright’s international influence on so many aspects of ancient Near Eastern studies, as witnessed by the frequent references to his work, may perhaps lie in the instrument he forged in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research which he founded and edited for 38 years till 1968.” But more importantly: “Yet the major reason for Albright’s wide-spread influence was his own character… If the world of scholarship in general remembers Albright as the Nestor of Biblical archaeology, many individuals, like the writer, will recall his infectious enthusiasm and the encouragement he so constantly gave that one left his study determined to work harder to be a true scholar and to become a man of wide vision and faith as he was.”
In the estimable opinion of the great Yigael Yadin: “He who is called upon to do honour to Professor W. F. Albright…is honoured by association, for there is surely no other scholar of our time who has made a comparable impact on as many fields as Albright, the last though not least honoured of a trio of giants which began with Petrie and Vincent.”
And finally, in the words of Ted Lewis, “Between the 1930s and the 1960s, especially in America, one could not find a more influential scholar than William Foxwell Albright (1891–1971), whose work in ‘Oriental studies’ and archaeology (cf. Albright 1935, 1940, 19571966b, 1968a, 1968b) would almost single-handedly shape an entire generation of scholarship.”
In one word, Albright was a self-described “orientalist” in the days before the use of the term was uncontroversial. The grand total of his published bibliography includes just under 1100 articles, reviews, books, and reports. The breadth of his work ranges from Sumerian etymology to medieval Islamic culture and beyond. He has received in his honor more tributes, memorial notices, biographical, and bibliographical sketches than any other scholar of Near Eastern studies in the 20th century. It is one of my life goals, as ambitious as it sounds, to read the entire literary output by and about Albright. We begin, of course, with this chronologically-arranged, comprehensive bibliography.
This is the first published article of Albright, written some five-six years after he received his PhD (1916)
Description forthcoming.
Description forthcoming.