Julius Johann Heinrich Jordan (27 October 1877 – 7 February 1945) was a German archaeologist active in Mesopotamia before and after the First World War.
In the 1930s he was the Director of the Iraq Museum.
Early life
Born in
Kassel in 1877, Jordan was educated at the Wilhelm-Gymnasium there, then in the spring of 1896 was admitted to the structural engineering department of the
TU Dresden to study
architecture. In Dresden he became a member of a group known as the Erato singers.
[Paul Meißner, ed., Alt-Herren-Verzeichnis der DS-W.-S. 1933/34 (Leipzig, 1934), p. 246] His most important teacher was Cornelius Gurlitt, and Jordan also found a life-changing friendship with an older student,
Walter Andrae. After graduating from this course around 1902, Jordan worked as a government construction manager in
Chemnitz.
[Heinrich J. Lenzen, "Jordan, Julius", in Neue Deutsche Biographie Vol. 10 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1974, ), pp. 601–602]
Career
In 1904, with the help of Andrae, Jordan joined the German excavations at
Assur, working there for eight years, and he also became a pupil of
Robert Koldewey (1855–1925), who was working on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. In 1910 Jordan received a doctorate, supervised by Cornelius Gurlitt in Dresden, with a dissertation entitled "Construction Elements of Assyrian Monumental Buildings" (
Konstruktionselemente assyrischer Monumentalbauten).
["Jordan, Julius" in Hans Baumann, The Land of Ur: The Discovery of Ancient Mesopotamia (Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 140]
Between 14 November 1912 and 12 May 1913, a German Oriental Society team led by Jordan, assisted by Conrad Preusser, began the first systematic excavations at Uruk. In that first season, he focused work on the two main temple complexes, known as the Eanna and the Rêś.[Christine Proust, John Steele, Scholars and Scholarship in Late Babylonian Uruk (2019), p. 36]
During the First World War, Jordan worked in an architectural office in Munich. He could not return to his archaeological interests in Mesopotamia, now Mandatory Iraq under British control, until 1926. From 1928 to 1931 he excavated again at Uruk, then from 1931 to 1939 worked for the museum service of the newly independent Kingdom of Iraq as director of the Iraq Museum. During the Second World War he was a consultant at the German Archaeological Institute and a visiting professor of architectural history at Technische Universität Berlin.[ He died of a stomach ulcer in the Franziskus Hospital in Tiergarten in February 1945.]["Jordan, Julius Johann Heinrich" in Register of Deaths for Tiergarten, Berlin, entry No. 331/1945]
He was buried in the Stahnsdorf South-Western Cemetery.[
]
Selected publications
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Julius Jordan, Uruk-Warka (51. Wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichung der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft, 1928)
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Julius Jordan, "Vorläufiger Bericht über die von der Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft in Uruk-Warka unternommenen Ausgrabungen" in Abhandlungen der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1929, 1930, and 1931
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Julius Jordan, Die Ausgrabungen der Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft in Uruk-Warka 1930/1931 (1933)
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Julius Jordan, A Guide through the Ruins of Babylon and Borsippa (Baghdad, 1937)
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Julius Jordan, Der nahe Osten (Stuttgart, 1942)
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Julius Jordan, Leistungen und Aufgaben der deutschen Ausgrabungen im Vorderen Orient (Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1944)
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