Author Description

Daniel Chwolson (or Khvolson) was born in Vilna in 1819 and educated for the rabbinate. He attended universities in Breslau (Wroclaw) and Leipzig and became a professor of Oriental Studies in St Petersburg in 1855. This important monograph, originally published in German in 1859, was a milestone in the scholarly understanding of the ancient Near East. Chwolson argued, controversially, for the existence of a highly developed civilisation in Babylon long before the rise of the Greeks. His hypothesis was based on Arabic texts, preserved in several manuscripts, which the Muslim author (working in the early tenth century C.E.) claimed to have translated from ancient sources. In this volume Chwolson discusses three complete texts (a 1300-page treatise on agriculture, a medical work on poisons, and an astrological work) and a number of fragments. For each text, he considers the date and context of its composition, its authorship and its content.