The Rev. Archibald Henry Sayce (25 September 1845 – 4 February 1933), was a pioneer British Assyriologist and linguist, who held a chair as Professor of Assyriology at the University of Oxford from 1891 to 1919.
Archibald Sayce was born in Shirehampton, Bristol, to a family of Shropshire descent. A delicate child who suffered from tuberculosis and got a late start, he soon caught up with a private tutor and was readingHomer in Greek at ten. He attended The Queen's College, Oxford, becoming a fellow in 1869.
In 1874 Sayce published a long paper, "The Astronomy and Astrology of the Babylonians" in Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology vol. 3, part 1), with transcriptions and translations of the relevantcuneiform texts, that was one of the first articles to recognise and translate astronomical cuneiform texts.
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