The Biography of Sarah Israelit Groll, recently deceased.

Professor Sarah Israelit Groll, one of the key figures in our understanding of the Egyptian language during the Ramesside period, died early in the morning of Saturday, December 15th, in Jerusalem,
shortly before her 82nd birthday.

Sarah was born in Tel Aviv in 1925, but lived most of her life in Jerusalem. She was one of a select group of students taught by the fabled Hans-Jakob Polotsky, and every summer travelled to Oxford to
study Ramesside texts with Professor Jaroslav Cerny. By applying Polotsky's rigorous structuralist methodology to Cerny's documentary corpus, she enlarged and codified our knowledge of the Ramesside
verbal system.

She published her findings in her works Non-Verbal Sentence Patterns in Late Egyptian (1967), The Negative Verbal System of Late Egyptian (1970), and (based on the earlier grammar of Jaroslav Cerny) A Late Egyptian Grammar (1975). She also edited several collections of articles on Egyptological topics.

In 1972 Sarah Groll founded the Department of Egyptology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which became an international centre for the study of Ramesside texts. She was an immensely helpful and
supportive mentor for her advanced students, and took great pains to look after them whilst they were writing their theses.

Sarah was very hospitable: she loved inviting her students out to eat, or having her students around to tea at her house. The images which I will always remember are of Sarah and a group of students from all over the world, sitting round her table in her office reading Ramesside texts or in a restaurant tucking into a wonderful meal.


Dr. Deborah Sweeney,
Senior Lecturer in Egyptology,
The Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures,
Tel Aviv University.