Albert Tobias Clay

Albert Tobias Clay (December 4, 1866 – September 14, 1925) was an American professor, historian and Semitic linguist. He was professor of Assyriology and Babylonian Literature at Yale University and served as founding curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection.

Background

Albert Tobias Clay was born at Hanover in York County, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania during 1889 and from the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg in 1892. He was subsequently ordained into the Lutheran ministry.

Career

Clay went on to become a teaching fellow in Assyrian and instructor in the Hebrew language at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1895–99, he returned as lecturer in Semitic archaeology after being an instructor in Old Testament theology at the Chicago Lutheran Seminary. He was assistant professor of Semitic philology and archaeology 1903–09 and full professor for one year.

In 1910, Clay became the William M. Laffan Professor of Assyriology and Babylonian Literature at Yale University. In 1909, J. Pierpont Morgan funded the founding of the Yale Babylonian Collection at Yale University. Clay served as its first curator, a position which he held until his death in 1925. His assistant Ettalene M. Grice succeeded him as acting curator from 1925 to 1926.

Clay was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1912. He served as Librarian of the American Oriental Society from 1913 to 1924 and as its president in 1924–25. He first visited Iraq in 1920, and returned in 1923 as the Commissioner for the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) to formally open the Society school in Baghdad. He remained as its first annual Visiting Professor and deputy director (1923–24).