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Miriam Lichtheim

Israeli egyptologist (1914-2004)

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionApr 23, 2026
Entity authorityQ438850 ↗
Source-derived summary

Miriam Lichtheim (Hebrew: מרים ליכטהיים ; 3 May 1914 – 27 March 2004)

was an American-Israeli Egyptologist, academic, librarian, and translator.

Biography

Miriam Lichtheim was born on May 3, 1914 in Constantinople, Ottoman Empire (now Istanbul, Turkey) to Richard Lichtheim and Irene Lichtheim (née Hafter). Lichtheim's father, born in Berlin to a German-Jewish family, was a politician, diplomat, and Zionist. Lichtheim's mother was born in Constantinople to a Greek speaking Sephardic Jewish family. Lichtheim's older brother was George Lichtheim, a British Marxist journalist.

From 1913 to 1917, Miriam's father Richard Lichtheim was the successor to Victor Jacobson, representative of the Zionist World Organization in Istanbul. Due to suspicions of espionage, the Lichtheim family returned to Germany in 1919 following the end of World War I.

In 1934, the family emigrated to Mandatory Palestine. On 26 December 1935, Lichtheim became a naturalised Palestinian citizen. Lichtheim 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.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Miriam Lichtheim” as israeli egyptologist (1914-2004). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Miriam, Lichtheim and Israeli.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1914, 2004, 1913, 1917—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Miriam, Lichtheim and Israeli providing the first useful test.
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Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q438850. The first chronological checks are 1914, 2004, 1913 and 1917.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Miriam Lichtheim” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.