Edmond Sollberger

Edmond Sollberger, FBA (12 October 1920 – 21 June 1989) was a Turkish-born, Swiss–British museum curator, cuneiformist and scholar of the Sumerian language.

Early life and education A Swiss citizen, Sollberger was born in Istanbul on 12 October 1920. He learnt to speak French, English, Turkish and Greek. He studied at the University of Geneva, graduating in 1945 and then continuing to study linguistics under Henri Frei. He then went to Rome, where studied Sumerian under Anton Deimel in 1947.

Career In 1949, Sollberger was appointed an assistant keeper of archaeology at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire in Geneva. While there, he wrote Études de Linguistique Sumérienne (1950), Le Système Verbal dans les Inscriptions "Royales" Présargoniques de Lagaš (1952) and Corpus des Inscriptions "Royales" Présargoniques de Lagaš (1956); for the 1952 book, he received the DLitt from the University of Geneva in 1952.

Sollberger had a stroke in 1982, which left him unable to continue his duties; he retired from the British Museum in 1983. He died on 21 June 1989; his wife Ariane and their two daughters survived him. A volume of studies in his memory has been edited by Paul Garelli.