Miriam Lichtheim was an Israeli translator of ancient Egyptian texts whose translations are still widely used.
Education
In the 1930s, she studied under Hans Jakob Polotsky in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In a paper of recollections about her teacher she recalls that, at the beginning of the year, in Polotsky"s Egyptian class there were four students. At the end, only she remained.
In 1941, she travelled to the United States where she studied and received a Doctor of Philosophy in Egyptology from the University of Chicago.
Career
She worked as an academic librarian at Yale University, and then at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was Near East Bibliographer and Lecturer until her retirement in 1974. In 1982, she moved to Israel where she taught at the Hebrew University. She died in 2004. In 1973, she published the first volume of the Ancient Egyptian Literature (abbr AEL), annotated translations of Old and Middle Kingdom texts.
In 1976, the second volume of AEL containing New Kingdom texts appeared, followed in 1980 by the third dealing with the first millennium Bachelor of Civil Engineering literature.