Mary Inda Hussey

Mary Inda Hussey (June 17, 1876 – June 20, 1952) was an American Assyriologist and professor. She taught Biblical studies, Assyriology, and cuneiform at Wellesley College and Mount Holyoke College.

Early life and education

Mary Inda Hussey was born June 17, 1876, in New Vienna, Ohio, to John M and Ann Hussey. Raised in a Quaker family, her father was the co-editor of the Quaker Magazine, The Christian Worker. Throughout her life, Hussey identified as a pacifist and was active in the Society of Friends.

Hussey moved with her family to Richmond, Indiana in 1890, where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree at Earlham College. She continued her studies at Bryn Mawr College focusing on Assyriology and cuneiform.

Before obtaining her PhD in 1906 from Bryn Mawr under the supervision of George A. Barton, she undertook graduate work alongside the leading researchers in her field. She studied at the University of Pennsylvania where Morris Jastrow Jr., Hermann Volrath Hilprecht and Albert Tobias Clay were faculty members, before attending the University of Berlin, where Friedrich Delitzsch was a lecturer, and continuing on to the University of Leipzig where she studied with Heinrich Zimmern.

Her doctoral thesis was titled Some Sumerian-Babylonian Hymns of the Berlin Collection and appeared in a 1907 edition of the American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures.

Teaching career In 1907, Hussey accepted a position at Wellesley College where she taught biblical history until 1909. Her time at the Museum coincided with the tenure of founding curator David Gordon Lyon. In a document by the Mount Holyoke Press Bureau in 1942, the Academic Dean of Mount Holyoke College said of Hussey, "One of her greatest satisfactions she finds in her students, whose work has been a rich reward." During a leave of absence in 1931, Hussey served as annual professor at the American Center of Oriental Research in Jerusalem. She continued her research well past retirement, having nearly completed a volume of Akkadian tablets held in Yale Babylonian Collection at the time of her death. She was remembered in an obituary by The New York Times as "a linguist of note" who was known for "digging up, translating and analyzing the most ancient written records."

While not much is known about Hussey's personal life, Harriet M. Allyn, Academic Dean of Mount Holyoke College in 1942, described Hussey as: “Any alumna returning to South Hadley may have the good luck to find [Hussey], the gracious hostess and good story teller, surrounded by her colonial furniture and oriental treasures in the charming old house which she has remodeled, up at the turn of Morgan Road. There she will greet you and tell you of her adventures, and there she will give you her philosophy of the ever ancient and ever modern "the line along which we have to develop is the line of good will.""