Quick Facts
Biography
Abraham Sachs (1915 – April 22, 1983) was an American assyriologist. He earned his PhD in Assyriology in 1939 at Johns Hopkins University.
Of note is his collaboration with Otto Neugebauer, whom he met in 1941 when the latter visited the Oriental Institute in Chicago; Neugebauer and Sachs joined on the publication of Babylonian astronomical texts.
In 1948 Sachs was offered (and declined) the Chair in Assyriology at Johns Hopkins University in succession to William Albright.
In 1949 he worked at the Pontificio Instituto Biblico. In 1952 received a Rockefeller Foundation travel grant to study Babylonian astronomical diaries in the British Museum, where he had access to the text stocked by the pioneer British assyriologist Theophilus Pinches between 1895 and 1900. Sachs died due to cancer, leaving the task to Austrian assyriologist Hermann Hunger.
Several persons have brought an attention to Sach's eloquent and well-grounded rebuttal of Immanuel Velikovsky's theories during a debate at Brown University in 1965, which Velikovsky failed to contest ever since.