Miriam Lichtheim was a translator of ancient Egyptian texts whose translations are still widely used.

Biography

In the 1930s she studied under Hans Jakob Polotsky

Hans Jakob Polotsky

Hans Jakob Polotsky was an Israeli orientalist, linguist, and professor for Semitic languages and Egyptology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.- Biography :...

 at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In a paper of recollections about her teacher she recalls that, at the beginning of the year, in Polotsky's Egyptian class there were four students; at the end, only she remained. In 1941 she travelled to the United States where she studied and received a Ph.D. in Egyptology from the University of Chicago. She worked as an academic librarian at Yale

YALE

RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...

 University, and then at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was Near East Bibliographer and Lecturer until her retirement in 1974. In 1982 she moved to Israel

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

 where she taught at the Hebrew University. She died in 2004.

In 1973 she published the first volume of the Ancient Egyptian Literature (abbr. AEL), annotated translations of Old

Old Kingdom

Old Kingdom is the name given to the period in the 3rd millennium BC when Egypt attained its first continuous peak of civilization in complexity and achievement – the first of three so-called "Kingdom" periods, which mark the high points of civilization in the lower Nile Valley .The term itself was...

 and Middle Kingdom

Middle Kingdom of Egypt

The Middle Kingdom of Egypt is the period in the history of ancient Egypt stretching from the establishment of the Eleventh Dynasty to the end of the Fourteenth Dynasty, between 2055 BC and 1650 BC, although some writers include the Thirteenth and Fourteenth dynasties in the Second Intermediate...

 texts. In 1976 the second volume of AEL containing New Kingdom

New Kingdom

The New Kingdom of Egypt, also referred to as the Egyptian Empire is the period in ancient Egyptian history between the 16th century BC and the 11th century BC, covering the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Dynasties of Egypt....

texts appeared, followed in 1980 by the third dealing with the first millennium BCE literature.

Works

• Miriam Lichtheim & Elizabeth Stefanski, Coptic Ostraca from Medinet Habu, University of Chicago Oriental Institute Publications 1952.
• Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egypt: A survey of current historiography, The American Historical Review 1963
• Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 3 volumes, The University of California Press 1973-1980
• Miriam Lichtheim, Late Egyptian Wisdom Literature in the International Context, Orbis Biblicus Et Orientalis 1983
• Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian autobiographies chiefly of the Middle Kingdom: A study and an anthology, Orbis biblicus et orientalis 1988
• Miriam Lichtheim, Maat in Egyptian Autobiographies and Related Studies, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1992
• Miriam Lichtheim, Moral Values in Ancient Egypt, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1997
• Miriam Lichtheim, Telling it Briefly: A Memoir of My Life, University Press Fribourg 1999