Albert T. Clay

Albert Tobias Clay (December 4, 1866 - September 14, 1925) was an American professor, historian, and Semitic linguist. He was a professor of assyrology and Babylonian literature at Yale University and served as curator of the Yale Babylonian Assembly. Albert Tobias Clay was born in Hanover in York County, Pennsylvania. In 1889, he graduated from Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA, and in 1892 from the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg. Subsequently, he was ordained to Lutheran ministry. Clay became a teacher of the Assyrian language and a teacher of Hebrew at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1895-99, he returned as a lecturer in Semitic archeology after becoming a teacher of Old Testament theology at the Chicago Lutheran Seminary. He was an assistant professor of Semitic philology and archeology 1903-09 and professor for one year. In 1910, Clay became a professor of assyrology and Babylonian literature by William M. Luffan at Yale University. In 1909, J. Pierpont Morgan funded the creation of the Yale Babylonian Collection at Yale University. Clay served as his first curator, a post he held until his death in 1925. He served as the librarian of the American Eastern Society from 1913 to 1924 and its president in 1924-25. He first visited Iraq in 1920 and returned in 1923 as commissioner of the American Schools of Oriental Studies (ASOR) to officially open the Society’s school in Baghdad. He remained his first annual visiting professor and deputy director (1923-24).