Call Number:

1037

Repository:

University of Pennsylvania: Penn Museum Archives

Extent:

0.5 linear foot

Language:

English

Date:

1938-1939 (inclusive)

Creator:

Cowley, Arthur E., Sir, 1861-1931, Lake, Kirsopp, 1872-1946, and Lake, Silva, 1898-1983

Abstract:

The Lake Van, Turkey expedition was proposed by Sir Arthur Cowley, emimnent Semitic scholar. Jointly sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania Museum and Brown University, it was led by Professors Kirsopp and Silva Lake. The Lake Van, Turkey Exoedition Records consists of one archival box of data and oversize materials housed in the map case.

Sir Arthur E. Cowley worked with Alfred Neubauer, sub-librarian at the Bodleian Library, from 1890 onwards on the Samaritan liturgy; the results were published in two volumes in 1909. He was appointed assistant sub-librarian in 1896. Together, Cowley and Neubauer published The Original Hebrew of a Portion of Ecclesiasticus (1897) and Facsimiles of the Fragments Hitherto Recovered of the Book of Ecclesiasticus in Hebrew (1901). When Neubauer left the Bodleian in 1899, Cowley became sub-librarian and also taught rabbinical Hebrew literature as well as working on a catalogue of the library's Sanskrit collections and (with Neubauer) the second volume of the library's catalogue of Hebrew manuscripts. He was appointed as a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in May 1902,[2] and was awarded a D.Litt. by the university in 1908. He moved to the University of Cambridge in 1912 as Sandars Reader in Bibliography.[1]

During his time as Bodley's Librarian, he continued to pursue his own research interests, and was regarded as one of the leading Semitic scholars of the time.[1] In 1923 he published The Aramaic Papyri of the Fifth Century, a revision of his 1906 work, incorporating the critical results of the best-known Semitic scholars, his original text largely unaltered.[1] He translated from German into English the last complete significant edition of Wilhelm Gesenius' Hebrew grammar, revised by Emil Kautzsch; this edition is still widely used in Hebrew language studies around the world in the 21st century.

Kirsopp Lake (1872-1946) was a British biblical and patristic scholar and textual critic. He was born in Southampton, England, and died in South Pasadena, California. He was ordained into the Church of England and was curate of St. Mary the Virgin (Oxford, England) from 1897 to 1904, and was then a professor of early Christian literature at the University of Leiden until 1913. After 1914 he was a professor of early Christian literature at Harvard University. In 1919 he was appointed to a Harvard chair as Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History. He retired from Harvard in 1938. Lake was interested in archaeology and participated in many expeditions to the Near East. He visited Mount Sinai, Mount Athos, Turkey and Iraq. His excavations were cut short by World War II. In the early twentieth century, Lake discovered a textual family of New Testament manuscripts known as Family 1 (also known as Lake group). He also examined textual family Family II, and compared its text with text Codex Alexandrinus. Lake married his second wife, Silva New in 1932. Born in 1898, she was an accomplished scholar in her own right, and was a professor of Classics at Bryn Mawr College.

Silva Lake was born March 18, 1898 in New Haven, Connecticut to Bertrand Martin and Jane Downs Tipple. Following in her father’s academic footsteps – a pastor, biblical scholar and founder of the Methodist International College in Rome, Italy – she contributed to the fields of text criticism and New Testament research, published regularly, and participated in archaeological excavations in Serabit in the Sinai peninsula (1929, 1935), Samaria in ancient Palestine (1932, 1934), and Van, Turkey (1938-1940). She often collaborated with her second husband and fellow scholar, Kirsopp Lake.

Silva was educated at the University of Vermont in 1924 and received her Ph.D. from Brown University in 1936. She taught at the University of Vermont (1924), as head of the Latin Department at Miss McClintock’s School in Boston (1924-1925), and Bryn Mawr as a classics professor. She was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship (1929-1930) “for textual criticism of the New Testament and the discrimination of the textual families in Greek, Syriac and Armenian manuscripts of the New Testament.”

The Lake Van, Turkey Exoedition Records consists of one archival box of data and oversize materials housed in the map case. The textual records consist of correspondence, field notes, and reports. The graphic materials include drawings/plans and photographic reproductions.