Scheil, Vincent (secular name Jean)

SCHEIL, Vincent (secular name Jean). - Distinguished 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, in 1882 he became a friar preacher. He did his novitiate and scholasticate, because of the law against religious communities, at Belmonte (Spain), Volders (Austria), Corbara (Corsica). Returning to France, in 1887 he studied Assyriology at the Ecole des hautes études and at 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 (ibid.), together with his teacher Amiaud. A tireless worker, he became a supreme cuneiform epigrapher; endowed for Akkadian with a rare grammatical intuition and a tenacious lexical memory, he was a great pioneer of present-day Assyriology.

In Dec. 1890 he was appointed a member of the Mission archéologique française du Caire, and having moved to Cairo he studied Theban tombs, a biblical papyrus and especially two papyri of Philo, distinguishing himself here too as an epigrapher. There he met Hamby-Bey, who called him to the Ottoman Museum of Constantinople, for the arrangement and the scientific catalogue of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian antiquities (1892-93; during the vacations until 1898). By the Turkish government he was entrusted with the direction of the excavations of Sippar (Abū Habbah) near Bagdad; there he found an entire library of a cuneiform school (1894). In 1895 he succeeded Amiaud at the Ecole des hautes études. In 1899 J. de Morgan engaged him as cuneiform epigrapher for the excavations of Susa (v.), during which there occurred the discovery and the immediate decipherment and translation of the code of Hammurabi (v.), which won 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, the minister Combes placed his veto on it: in 1908 he was elected a member of the Institut de France. The pious religious regarded Assyriology as a service of God, rightly holding that the authenticity of the Bible is established by setting it within Oriental civilization.

Of his works J.-M. Vosté, in Orientalia, 11 (1942), pp. 80-108, lists 458 numbers. Conspicuous among them are the 16 vols. of the magnificent series Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse: besides vol. IV (with the code of Hammurabi), 2 vols. of Achaemenid texts, 5 vols. of Akkadian texts from Elam, 4 of Ananite texts (deciphered and interpreted by him for the first time), 2 vols. of proto-Elamite texts (for the decipherment of which he laid useful foundations), furthermore volumes of juridical texts from Elam and epigraphic miscellanies: an incredibly vast work in extremely difficult fields. He also composed two volumes of epigrams and poems in Latin.

Pietro Nober