Gordon, Cyrus

The son of a native of Lithuania, therapist Benjamin Gordon. He grew up in a family belonging to the upper stratum of the Jewish diaspora in the United States, and was educated with a significant share of non-religious disciplines. He began to study Hebrew from the age of five, already in childhood became interested in Latin and the Greek language.

He received bachelor's and master's degrees in arts, later a doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania. He also attended a number of courses at Gretz College (Gratz College) and Dropsie College (Dropsie College). These three universities had specialized programs in the Bible, classical studies, and the ancient Near East. There Gordon studied the ancient Persian language and Sanskrit .

He spent the first half of the 1930s. in the Middle East, in Baghdad and Jerusalem . He participated in the archaeological expeditions of Leonard Woolley in Ur , Flinders Petri in Tel el Ajul, W.F. Albright in Tel Beit Mirsim, and accompanied Nelson Gluck in his excavations in Jordan. He was engaged in the study and translation of ancient Egyptian inscriptions from Tel el Amarna as part of the John Pendlebury expedition.

When Gordon returned to the United States in 1935, he could not find a permanent academic position due to the Great Depression. He has held a number of temporary research and teaching positions at Johns Hopkins University, Smith College and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

In 1942, Gordon volunteered for the United States Army at the age of 33. Leading a group of decoders, Gordon, along with several other linguists, was engaged in the analysis of German and Japanese code messages - not only in German and Japanese, but also in languages ​​such as Arabic, Turkish and Persian. Gordon later noted that his cryptographic work in the American army gave him the necessary skills to decrypt inscriptions in the Minoan language (which, however, linguists recognized as unsuccessful). Later during the war, Lieutenant Gordon was sent to the Middle East, served in the Mediterranean, in Egypt, Palestine, Iraq and Iran, where he studied modern Persian, performing a number of duties such as serving as a translator or mediator with local officials and influential persons . At the same time, he found time to engage in scientific research, visited the excavation sites of ancient Persian cities, published a study on Aramaic magic bowls from the collection of the Tehran Museum.

After the war, Gordon received a permanent position at Dropsey College (Philadelphia) in 1946, where he taught until 1956, and then moved to Brandeis University for the next 18 years. Since 1973, he worked at New York University, led the center for the study of the ancient Syrian city of Ebla . Gordon resigned in 1989.

In the 1960s Gordon hypothesized that the Minoan language (Crete) was Semitic in origin. This hypothesis of Gordon was not widespread among linguists, since it was based only on the external similarity of some word forms, without a detailed analysis of morphology.

Gordon also claimed that in ancient times the Phoenicians and other Semitic peoples, such as Jews, crossed the Atlantic Ocean - his opinion was based on the assumption that the inscription from Bet Creek ^{[4] [5] [6] [7]} , discovered in Tennessee , and the inscription from Paraiba ^[8] from Brazil are authentic. Another argument was a stone from Los Lunas ^[9] . It was later established that the inscriptions cited by Gordon were fakes ^{[10] [7]} (Gordon admitted the possibility of forging a paraibian inscription) ^[8] .

• Ugaritic Grammar , 1940, Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, Rome.
• The Living Past , 1941, John Day, Van Rees Press, New York.
• Ugaritic Literature , 1949, Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, Rome.
• Ugaritic Manual , 1955, Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, Rome.
• " Homer and Bible ," 1955, Hebrew Union College Annual 26, pp. 43-108.
• The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations , 1962/1965, Norton Library, New York (previously published as Before the Bible, Harper & Row, New York).
• "The Accidental Invention of the Phonemic Alphabet," 1970, Journal Of Near Eastern Studies Vol. 29 # 3, pp. 193—197
• Before Columbus , 1971, Crown, New York.
• "Vergil and the Bible World," 1971, The Gratz College Anniversary Volume, Philadelphia: Gratz College.
• "Poetic Legends and Myths from Ugarit," 1977, Berytus # 25, pp. 5-133.
• Forgotten Scripts , 1982, Basic Books, New York (revised and enlarged version, previously published 1968, now containing Gordon's work on Minoan and Eteocretan). In Russian: Gordon Cyrus Herzl. Forgotten letters. Discovery and decryption

A full bibliography is published in The Bible World: Essays in Honor of Cyrus H. Gordon, edited by G. Rendsburg, R. Adler, Milton Arfa, and NH Winter, 1980, KTAV Publishing House Inc. and The Institute of Hebrew Culture and Education of New York University, New York.

• Gordon obituary