Jeremy Black

Who was Jeremy Black?

Jeremy Allen Black, BA, BPhil, MA, DPhil was a British Assyriologist and Sumerologist, founder of the online Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.

Black was born in Isleworth, Middlesex, England, and was brought up in Buckinghamshire, England. He was the only son of tea-taster Dudley Black and Joan née Denton. At age two he was isolated for a whole year in hospital with polio, then at age five he suffered the death of his mother.

After his attendance at Slough Grammar School for Boys, in 1969 Black went to Oxford University as Exhibitioner in Classics to Worcester College. At Oxford he became interested in the ancient languages and cultures of Mesopotamia, and after qualifying changed his studies to Sumerian and Akkadian under Professor Oliver Gurney. Black's BA dissertation was entitled "A History of Nippur, from the Earliest Times to the End of the Kassite Period”: this work was utilised in the very beginning of S.W. Cole's book Nippur in Late Assyrian Times, ca. 745-612 B.C., 1996, where it is described as the "only systematic treatment of Nippur's early history". In 1975 Black attained his BPhil in Cuneiform Studies.