Volkert Haas

Volkert Haas (1 November 1936 – 13 May 2019) was a German Assyrologist and Hittitologist.

Life Volkert Haas studied Assyrology and Near Eastern archaeology at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Marburg from 1963 to 1968. In December 1968 he received a doctorate in Assyriology from the Free University. After that, he was an assistant at the "Institute for the History of Medicine" at the Free University from 1969 to 1970. There he worked on Babylonian and Assyrian medical texts under the supervision of Franz Köcher. From 1970 to 1973, he carried out the research project "The Hurritological Archive" within the Ancient Near Eastern department of the Free University and he continued to be employed there as an assistant from 1973 to 1977. In 1979, Haas received his habilitation in Ancient Near Eastern philology. After holding an assistant professorship at the Free University from 1977 to 1981, Haas received a position as Professor of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Konstanz. In 1989, he received one of the two chairs of Near Eastern Studies at the Free University, where he remained until his retirement in 2001.

As a lecturer, Haas instructed several generations of students in Assyrian, Hittite, and Hurrian. The central focuses of his research were the language, literature and religious history of the Hurrians and the Hittites. Haas was one of the most prestigious specialists in Hittitology. His ongoing research projects are the Corpus der hurritischen Sprachdenkmäler or Hurritologisches Archiv (Corpus of Hurrian linguistic monuments or Hurritological Archive), "the Near Eastern Religions", "Hittite Medical Treatment," and a history of Hittite literature. He was editor of Altorientalische Forschungen (AoF).