SCHEIL, VINCENT (in the world JEAN). — Eminent Dominican Assyriologist, born at Königsmachern (Lorraine) on 10 June 1858, died in Paris on 21 September 1940.
Following his elder brother Sebastiano (1853-1931), an Orientalist and missionary in Mossul, he became a Friar Preacher in 1882. Because of the law against religious communities, he completed his novitiate and schooling at Belmonte (Spain), Volders (Austria), and Corbara (Corsica). Returning to France, in 1887 he studied Assyriology at the Ecole des hautes études and the Collège de France, under Amiaud and Oppert, and Egyptology under Maspero and Guieyze. In 1889 he published Inscription assyrienne de Samis-Ramman IV (Paris), and in 1890 Les inscriptions de Salmanassar II (there), together with his teacher Amiaud. An indefatigable worker, he became a supreme cuneiform epigraphist; endowed with rare grammatical intuition in Akkadian and tenacious lexical memory, he was a great pioneer of modern Assyriology.
In December 1890 he was appointed a member of the Mission archéologique française du Caire, and, having moved to Cairo, studied Theban tombs, a biblical papyrus, and especially two papyri of Philo, distinguishing himself here as well as an epigraphist. There he met Hamby-Bey, who summoned him to the Ottoman Museum in Constantinople for the arrangement and scientific cataloguing of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian antiquities (1892-93; during the holidays until 1898). The Turkish government entrusted him with the direction of the excavations at Sippar (Abū Habbah) near Baghdad; there he discovered an entire library belonging to a cuneiform school (1894). In 1895 he succeeded Amiaud at the Ecole des hautes études. In 1899 J. de Morgan engaged him as cuneiform Susa (v.), during which the discovery and immediate decipherment and HAMMURABI (HAMMURAPI) (v.) took place, bringing him worldwide fame. Leo XIII chose him among the first consultors of the Biblical Commission (1903). But when he was proposed (1905) as Oppert’s successor to the chair of Assyriology at the Collège de France, Minister Combes vetoed his appointment: in 1908 he was elected a member of the Institut de France. The pious religious regarded Assyriology as a service to God, rightly holding that the authenticity of the Bible is established by placing it within the context of Oriental civilization.
Among his works, J.-M. Vosté, in Orientalia, 11 (1942), pp. 80-108, lists 458 items. Particularly noteworthy are the 16 volumes of the magnificent series Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse: besides volume IV (containing the Code of Hammurabi), 2 volumes of Achaemenid texts, 5 volumes of Akkadian texts from Elam, 4 of Ananitic texts (deciphered and interpreted by him for the first time), 2 volumes of Proto-Elamite texts (for whose decipherment he laid useful foundations), as well as volumes of legal texts from Elam and epigraphic miscellanies: an incredibly vast body of work in extremely difficult fields. He also composed two volumes of epigrams and poems in Latin.