Private fureral services were held here today for Dr. Eparaim A. Speiser, one of the world’s leading Orientalists and for many years professor of Hebrew and Semitic languages, as well as a departmental chairman, at the University of Pennsyivania. He died yesterday at 63.
Sorn in what is now the Ukraine, he studied at the College of Lemberg and came to the United States in 1920, receiving his Ph. D. at the Dropsic College of Hebrew and Cognate Learning in 1924 when he was named Harrison Research Fellow in Semitics at the University of Pennsylvania.
He went to the Middle East in 1926 on a Guggenheim fellowship and in 1927 was a visiting professor at the Hebrew University and later annual professor at the American School of Oriental Studies in Baghdad. During that period he led archaeological expeditions in Iraq which cast light on civilizations leading back to the Stone Age.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
