SCHEIL, VINCENT (in religion Jean). — Eminent Dominican assyriologist, b. at Königsmachern (Lorraine) on 10 June 1858, d. at Paris on 21 Sept. 1940.
Following his elder brother Sebastian (1853–1931), an orientalist and missionary at Mosul, he entered the Dominican Order in 1882. Because of the law against religious communities, he made his novitiate and studied in Belmonte (Spain), Volders (Austria) and Corbara (Corsica). Returning to France in 1887, he studied Assyriology at the École des Hautes Études and at the Collège de France under Amiaud and Oppert, and Egyptology under Maspero and Guieysse. In 1889 he published Inscription assyrienne de Sami-Ramman IV (Paris) and in 1890, together with his teacher Amiaud, Les inscriptions de Salmanasar II (ibid.). An indefatigable worker, he became a foremost cuneiform epigraphist; gifted with rare grammatical insight and tenacious lexical memory in Akkadian, he was a great pioneer of modern Assyriology.
In December 1890 he was appointed a member of the French Archaeological Mission in Cairo, and on moving to Cairo he studied Theban tombs, a biblical papyrus and, in particular, two papyri of Philo, again distinguishing himself as an epigraphist. There he met Hamby-Bey, who invited him to the Ottoman Museum in Constantinople to arrange and catalogue the Egyptian and Mesopotamian antiquities (1892–93; continuing in the vacations until 1898). The Turkish government entrusted him with the direction of excavations at Sippar (Abū Ḥabbah) near Baghdad, where he discovered an entire library of a cuneiform school (1894). In 1895 he succeeded Amiaud at the École 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.) were made, an achievement that brought him world renown. Leo XIII chose him among the first consultants of the Biblical Commission (1903). When, however, he was proposed (1905) as successor to Oppert in the Assyriology chair at the Collège de France, the minister Combes vetoed the appointment; in 1908 he was elected a member of the Institut de France. The pious religious regarded Assyriology as a service to God, rightly believing that the authenticity of the Bible is established by situating it within the context of Oriental civilization.
J.-M. Vosté, in Orientalia, 11 (1942), pp. 80–108, lists 458 items among his works. Outstanding among them are the 16 volumes of the magnificent series Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse: besides vol. IV (containing the Code of Hammurabi), there are 2 volumes of Achaemenid texts, 5 volumes of Akkadian texts from Elam, 4 of Anshanite texts (deciphered and interpreted by him for the first time), 2 volumes of Proto-Aramaic texts (for whose decipherment he laid useful groundwork), as well as volumes of Elamite legal texts and miscellaneous epigraphic material—an incredibly vast output in fields of extreme difficulty. He also composed two volumes of epigrams and poems in Latin.