Edward Ullendorff Medal

Professor Alessandra Avanzini is awarded the 2024 Edward Ullendorff Medal for being one of the world’s leading scholars in Semitic Philology and South Arabian studies.

Her pioneering contributions range from studies of Semitic linguistics and epigraphy to topics relating to archaeology and the history of art. She has pioneered new approaches in the analysis and study of South Arabian epigraphic material, resulting in major advances in South Arabian lexicography, grammar and onomastics.

Alessandra Avanzini was born in Florence in 1946 and graduated at the University of Florence in Semitic Philology.

In the years 1972-1974, she was a member of a team directed by Pelio Fronzaroli on 'Research on the common Semitic lexicon'. In these years she began her study of the Ancient South Arabian languages. For 40 years (1976-2017) she was professor of Semitic Philology at the University of Pisa.

In the early 80s, she participated to the joint mission of Universities of Florence and Venice in northern Yemen ('Problemi storici della regione di al-Hada nel periodo preislamico e nuove iscrizioni', Studi yemeniti 1, Firenze, 1985).

Since 1989 to 1994, she worked with a French-Yemenite mission directed by Christian J. Robin and Muhammad Bāfaqīh in the area of the Qatabanian kingdom.

Her study of Qatabanic inscriptions ('Corpus of South Arabian Inscriptions – Qatabanic Inscriptions', Pisa, 2004) brought to the attention of the scientific community for the first time the richness of this documentation in linguistic-grammatical terms as well as in the historical-cultural data.

Here, she also pioneered a new approach in the analysis and study of the epigraphic material. She discovered the heuristic value of organizing the inscriptions according to text typology, which makes emerge the differences of formulary through the time and space.

A global analysis, which considers a range of different elements (palaeography, grammar, lexicon, formularies and also a stylistic analysis of the text’s support) can be crucial for understanding an inscription and for proposing its date.

From the linguistic point of view, she hypothesised the possible reconstruction of a linguistic continuum, dating back to the end of second millennium, from which the south Arabian languages emerged through differentiating mechanism. She therefore supported an endogenous formation model for Ancient South Arabian languages and culture (‘Origin and Classification of the Ancient South Arabian Languages’, 'Journal of Semitic Studies' 54, 2008, 205-220; 'Ancient South Arabian within Semitic, and Sabaic within Ancient South Arabian', Roma 2015).

She tried to overturn the marginalization of South Arabia within the Ancient Near East history, and sought instead to promote a new role and importance of south Arabian history and culture ('By Land and by Sea: A History of South Arabia Before Islam Recounted from Inscriptions', Roma 2017).

From 1996 to 2019 she was director of the IMTO (Italian Mission To Oman) mission that has been working on the site of the ancient city of Sumhuram, in the territory of Khor Rori, and at Salut near Nizwa. The investigations conducted over these years resulted in more than 20 articles (eg ‘Un port d’Arabie entre Rome et l’Inde’, 'Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions & Belles-Lettres' 2014, 1, 485-508), and three final reports in addition to the mission annual preliminary reports.

In 2001, she started the project ‘Corpus of South Arabian Inscriptions’ for a complete edition of the Ancient South Arabian corpus online.

Since 2011 to 2016, she was Principal Investigator of the ERC Advanced Grant European project DASI (Digital Archive for the Study of Ancient Arabian Inscriptions.

"I feel deeply honoured to have been nominated for the Edward Ullendorff medal, and grateful for the completely unexpected appreciation of my work. Furthermore, it is truly significant for me that the medal is in the name of an illustrious Ethiopist such as Edward Ullendorff.

"I believe that the South Semitic documentation can help to pose new problems, to achieve original and interesting conclusions for a general study of Semitic philology. Ethiopia and Yemen are areas with a great cultural past. The epigraphic languages ​​of ancient Yemen, classical Ethiopic, the numerous modern Semitic languages ​​of Ethiopia and Eritrea bear witnesses to continuous linguistic and cultural contacts and to vitality and openness towards neighbours.

"Today there is war in both Ethiopia and Yemen and the news coming from these countries is dramatic and, at least to date, devoid of hope for short-term peace. There's not much we can do, except maybe strive to make their glorious past known. That is to say collecting and preserving their documentation as Edward Ullendorff did publishing the Ethiopian manuscripts of Oxford, Cambridge and Windsor and I tried to do creating an online database of the South Arabian inscriptions."

- Professor Alessandra Avanzini, August 2024

2023 Professor Mauro Tosco, University of Turin

2022 Professor Werner Diem, Cologne University

2021 Professor Olga Kapeliuk, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

2020 Professor Otto Jastrow, Tallinn University

2019 Professor Michael Knibb FBA, King's College London

2018 Professor John Huehnergard, University of Texas at Austin

2017 Dr Veronika Six, University of Hamburg

2016  Dr Sebastian Brock FBA, University of Oxford

2015  Dr Siegbert Uhlig, University of Hamburg

2014  Professor David Appleyard, School of African and Oriental Studies

2013  Professor Getatchew Haile FBA, Hill Museum & Manuscript Library of Saint John's University, USA

2012  Professor Simon Hopkins FBA, Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Eligible nominations can be for any scholarly distinction and achievements in the field of Semitic languages and Ethiopian studies.

Nominations for this award are open from 1 December to 31 January and may only be made by Fellows of the British Academy. Entries should be submitted electronically via this nomination form.

The deadline for submissions is 31 January each year. Nominations will be reviewed, and the winner selected, by the relevant panel.

If you have any queries submitting a nomination, please email [email protected].