William Muss-Arnolt


William Muss-Arnolt was an Assyriologist and librarian known for his exposition of the Assyrian language.
Muss-Arnolt received a B.D. from New Brunswick Theological Seminary in 1883, and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1888. He taught at the University of Michigan for one semester, then went to the University of Chicago, where he continued work on his Concise Dictionary of the Assyrian Language. He ended his career a librarian at the Boston Public Library.
In 1900 Muss-Arnolt published an article positing a Babylonian origin for the words Urim and Thummim in the Hebrew Bible. This article originally appeared in the American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures and was thereafter published separately by the University of Chicago Press.
Muss-Arnolt's Concise Dictionary of the Assyrian Language was completed in 1905, providing a useful tool for translators faced with a large volume of newly discovered cuneiform texts. The Chicago Tribune wrote of this work in progress in 1901:
An ordinary dictionary stands as a monument to several men's perseverance, but one compiled by one man which has to make plain in two languages the mysteries of the Assyrian is not an ordinary monument—it is an obelisk.

University of Michigan librarian William W. Bishop wrote that he owes to Muss-Arnolt "a severe regard for bibliographic accuracy." He also mentions that Muss-Arnolt was Protestant, with Jewish ancestry.

Selected publications