Schrader, EBERHARD, a learned Assyriologist, was born at Brunswick, January 5, 1836, studied at Göttingen, where he bent to oriental studies was confirmed by Ewald, and became ordinary professor of Theology at Zurich in 1863, Giessen in 1870, and Jena in 1873. In 1875 he obeyed a call from Berlin to the chair of Oriental Languages, with a seat in the Academy of Sciences.
His earliest books were devoted to Old Testament criticism—Studien zur Kritik und Erklärung der biblischen Urgeschichte (1863), and a fresh edition—the eighth—of De Wette's Einführung (1869). Turning next to Assyriology, he quickly placed himself at the head of German scholars by an unrivalled combination of wide erudition and critical sagacity. His books are Die Assyrisch-Babylonischen Keilinschriften (1872); Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament (1872; 2d ed. 1883; Eng. trans. 2 vols. 1885-86); Die Höllenfahrt der Istar (1874); Keilinschriften und Geschichtsforschung (1878), in which he combats in masterly fashion the attack of the historian Gutschmid on the method and result of work in the cuneiform inscriptions; and Zur Frage nach dem Ursprung der Babylon. Kultur (1884). There is a translation by Mr F. B. Jeavons of his important Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples (1890).