Life and Works
Assmann studied Egyptology and classical archaelogy in Munich, Heidelberg, Paris und Göttingen. In 1966-67 he was a fellow of the German Archaeological Insitute in Cairo, where he continued as an independent scholar from 1967 to 1971. After completing his habilitation in 1971, he was named a professor of Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg in 1976, where he taught until his retirement in 2003. He was then named an honorary professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Constance, where he is today.
In the 1990s Assmann and his wife Aleida Assmann developed a theory of cultural and communicative memory that has received much international attention. He is also known beyond egyptological circles for his interpretation of the origins of monotheism, which he dates to the Exodus from Egypt of the Israelites.
Read more about this topic: Jan Assmann
Famous quotes containing the words life and, life and/or works:
“Death or life or life or death
Death is life and life is death
I gotta use words when I talk to you
But if you understand or if you dont
That’s nothing to me and nothing to you
We all gotta do what we gotta do”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment.... The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“That man’s best works should be such bungling imitations of Nature’s infinite perfection, matters not much; but that he should make himself an imitation, this is the fact which Nature moans over, and deprecates beseechingly. Be spontaneous, be truthful, be free, and thus be individuals! is the song she sings through warbling birds, and whispering pines, and roaring waves, and screeching winds.”
—Lydia M. Child (1802–1880)