Customer Reviews

A Scholar's Odyssey (Biblical Scholarship in North America)

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In a day and age when the fields of epigraphy and archeology are turning out few advancements or challenges to the accepted theories, Cyrus H. Gordon is a giant in scholarship. Frank, opinionated, even controversial, the master linguist defies convention and his peers to state his work results. His career, which is covered in this book, begins in the Mid-East at the end of the Great Egyptian Tomb era in the years before World War II and continues to this day. Gordon's meetings and mentorship by such daunting figures as Flinders Petrie and Sir Leonard Wooley make fascinating reading for any lover of history. Gordon's contribution to language and writing, including his decipherment of Linear A, are diagrammed. His challenges to our limited understanding of history, shaped by a late European prejudice, make the reader think beyond the confines of rote learning that are, unfortunately, constricting the academic fields of language and ancient history today. In the end, this book holds a great deal for anyone who has an interest in Egyptian, Minoan, or Persian history or the emergence of language. This Cyrus the Great holds an empery of the past.

I had the good fortune to hear Cyrus Gordon speak at the SBL conference in New Orleans in 1996. I want to emphasize that this was good fortune because when the reader reads Gordon's autobio-graphy, the reader may be a bit taken aback by an apparent amount of defensiveness and, conversely, bragging. Yet consider...

As it turned out I also attended another session at that same SBL conference where a paper was delivered on politics in the academic world. Politics in the academic world is a grad student finding a doctoral program where one's advisor or doktor vater has a similar point of view and will help promote the student into the academic world.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Gordon's autobiography from his upbringing to his retirement. When he wrote that he had learned yet another language, I thought about the fact that he has had his method repeated on internet newsgroups frequented by scholars. When he wrote that his daughter read hieroglyphics at a museum before she could read English, I shared a parent's pride. And when he retired.... I marveled at the list of distinguished names of Cyrus H Gordon's doctoral students.

The word "odyssey" reminds one of Homer's epics of great men and their journeys. The life of Cyrus Gordon really was an odyssey of a scholar.