Boys at Westminster Under School from 1948 to 1955 may have been surprised at the way their Classics Master spent his spare time. He sat in the British Museum peering at ancient clay tablets and drawing the cuneiform signs impressed upon them. Back in his lodgings, he studied and translated them. In this way Wilfred Lambert began the career which was to make him the pre-eminent authority in the world on Babylonian and Assyrian literature. Leaving King Edward’s High School in Birmingham in 1943, he studied Latin and Greek at Cambridge (1943-45), returning, after a break for service in farming as a conscientious objector, to take a course in Hebrew and Assyrian (1948-50). Assyriology became the central interest of his life. The texts he copied while a school master formed the nucleus of his first major publication, Babylonian Wisdom Literature, which offers some valuable comparisons with the Hebrew books of Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. It is still the standard work, despite the discovery of additional texts. By the time the book appeared (1960), he had left England to become a lecturer in Near eastern Studies at the University of Toronto, then, in 1959, to an associate professorship at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, following the famous archaeologist and biblical scholar, W. F. Albright. Birmingham was his home, so he delightedly moved back in 1964 to teach at the University, retiring as Professor in 1993.
The most important source for ancient Babylonia literature today is the remnant of the great library king Ashurbanipal collected in Nineveh in the 7th century B.C. (between the times of Isaiah and Jeremiah). Most of the surviving tablets are held in the British Museum and almost all are broken, having fallen from shelves or been struck by debris when the Babylonians and Medes sacked the city in 612 B.C. To recover the ancient compositions means examining the fragments to join pieces and reconstruct as much as possible of each tablet. Happily, there were several copies of many ‘books’, so often gaps in one copy can be filled from another. By combing the collection of over 25,000 pieces and reading many from other places in the British Museum and museums in Europe, the Near East and North America, Lambert gained an unrivalled knowledge of Babylonian culture and thought.
Following his work on wisdom literature, he turned to ancient accounts of creation. He was gathering material for a definitive presentation and discussion of Babylonian and the earlier Sumerian narratives when the writer, employed in the British Museum, came upon two unusually large, broken, tablets (about 8 inches high, whereas most cuneiform tablets can be held in the hand). Made about 1635 B.C., they relate the creation of mankind and the Flood. Lambert had worked on previously known small fragments of the story, so it was appropriate to work together to produce Atrahasis. The Babylonian Story of the Flood in 1969. The tablets had been misplaced in the Museum’s tablet collection and came to light in the course of cataloguing fragments from Nineveh scattered throughout it. That search brought to light several literary pieces, so the Catalogue of the Cuneiform Tablets in the Kouyunjik Collection of the British Museum, Second Supplement (1968) was another joint work. He was always a congenial colleague, supportive and ready to share his insights and new information, although his comments could be scathing when others failed to reach his high standards, as some of his book reviews reveal. His work on creation stories was constantly interrupted by attention to other compositions, but he had completed it before his death and had funding to enable a younger scholar to computerise his typescript, so this long-awaited publication is shortly to appear.
Assyriology has always contributed to Biblical Studies and Lambert was well-read in that field, as might be expected. Besides attending the annual conferences of Assyriologists, based in Paris, but held in various parts of the world, he was present regularly at the British Society for Old Testament Studies meetings in January and July and was President of the Society in 1984. He published essays on Biblical topics as illuminated by cuneiform texts and was severely critical of Biblical experts who misinterpreted them, yet he was always ready to help those who sought his advice, either in person or by letter, and he would readily read their work before it went to the printer.
Austere and reserved at a first meeting, he could discuss a wide range of topics with knowledge and humour, all the while eager to revert to Assyriology. His death deprives that subject and Biblical studies of an outstanding, original and stimulating scholar.
A tribute to the work of the late HP Mansfield