Alan Millard


Alan Ralph Millard was a British orientalist who was Rankin Professor of Hebrew and Ancient Semitic languages, and Honorary Senior Fellow, at the School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology in the University of Liverpool.
Millard worked on excavations at Tell Nebi Mend and Tell Rif'at in Syria, at Petra in Jordan, and at the Assyrian capital Nimrud in Iraq. While working at the British Museum 1961–1964, he rediscovered the Epic of Atrahasis, which had lain unrecognised in a drawer for some decades. From 1964 to 1970, he was Librarian at Tyndale House, Cambridge, and taught Akkadian for a year at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London. In 1970, he was appointed Rankin Lecturer in Hebrew and Ancient Semitic Languages at the University of Liverpool. He was a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1984, studying in a team led by Yigael Yadin. His main interest lay in Semitic epigraphy, and in editing Akkadian cuneiform tablets and Aramaic inscriptions. Scribal practices in the ancient Near East remained a dominant concern for him; the importance he ascribed to this topic stems largely from his belief as an Evangelical Christian in the essential historicity of the Bible – a point of view he shared with his colleague at Liverpool, the Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen.
Millard was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, a member of the Society for Old Testament Study – and was also Vice-Chairman of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. He died on 6 June 2024, at the age of 86.

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