Saturday, December 29, 2007

Sad News: Professor Sarah Groll

Archaeogate Egittologia

My gratitude to Helen Strudwick for letting me know the sad news that Professor Sarah Groll passed away on 15th December 2007. A notice on the Archeogate includes a short obituary by Dr Deborah Sweeney:

Professor Sarah Israelit Groll, one of the key figures in our understanding of the Egyptian language during the Ramesside period, died early in the morning of Saturday, December 15th, in Jerusalem,
shortly before her 82nd birthday.

Sarah was born in Tel Aviv in 1925, but lived most of her life in Jerusalem. She was one of a select group of students taught by the fabled Hans-Jakob Polotsky, and every summer travelled to Oxford to study Ramesside texts with Professor Jaroslav Cerny. By applying Polotsky's rigorous structuralist methodology to Cerny's documentary corpus, she enlarged and codified our knowledge of the Ramesside
verbal system.

She published her findings in her works Non-Verbal Sentence Patterns in Late Egyptian (1967), The Negative Verbal System of Late Egyptian (1970), and (based on the earlier grammar of Jaroslav Cerny) A Late Egyptian Grammar (1975). She also edited several collections of articles on Egyptological topics.

In 1972 Sarah Groll founded the Department of Egyptology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which became an international centre for the study of Ramesside texts.


See the above for more.

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