In 1869, Sayce was appointed a lecturer at Queen's College. He was ordained a priest in the Church of England in 1870. Ongoing problems with his sight almost led to the end of his Oxford career and Sayce spent much of his time travelling Europe. It was only from 1874, when he came under the supervision of ophthalmologist Richard Liebreich, that Sayce was able to continue his academic career. In the same year he was appointed as the university's representative in the Old Testament Revision Company. Sayce also began to deliver lectures to the Nineveh Society of Biblical Archaeology and contributed to The Times and the New York Independent. In 1876 Sayce was appointed the Deputy Professor of Comparative Philology, a role shared with the continuing Professor, Max Müller, who wanted to reduce his duties.
From 1872, Sayce spent most of his summers travelling for his health and in search of new texts. In 1879 he resigned from his tutorship at Oxford to dedicate his time to his research and exploring the near East. In 1881, Sayce was one of the first scholars to examine the Siloam Inscription, which he described in the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly. Sayce resigned his professorship in 1890 and briefly moved to Egypt, where he was instrumental in the reopening of the Museum of Cairo in 1891. In 1891, Sayce returned to Oxford to become the university's first Professor of Assyriology.
After his retirement in 1915, Sayce continued to write and spent his time in Edinburgh, Oxford and Egypt. By the end of his life, Sayce was considered[by whom?] to be an amateur rather than a specialist and was criticized[by whom?] for his lack of intellectual penetration and outdated opposition to the work of continental orientalists. In 1923, he published Reminiscences, an account of his life and his numerous travels. At the time of his death he was working on a translation of inscriptions discovered at Ras Shamra. Sayce died on 4 February 1933 in Bath.
Sayce is also seen by some as one of founding fathers of the 'Reform Movement' in linguistic research at the end of the 19th century. His two notable works, Introduction to the Science of Language (1879), and The Principles of Comparative Philology (1880), introduced audiences to the changing continental linguistic trends in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The books challenged the current thinking in comparative philology and the importance of what Sayce termed the principle of analogy.
In the late 1870s, Sayce moved away from his Sumerian studies and concentrated upon Indo-European languages. He theorized that the pseudo-sesostris rock carvings in Asia Minor, such as the Karabel relief which had been historically attributed to the Egyptians, were actually created by another pre-Greek culture. In 1876 he speculated that the hieroglyphs in inscriptions discovered at Hamath in Syria, were not related to Assyrian or Egyptian scripts but came from another culture he identified as the Hittites. In 1879, Sayce further theorized that reliefs and inscriptions at Karabel, İvriz, Bulgarmaden [de], Carchemish, Alaca Höyük, and Yazilikaya were created by the Hittites. His hypothesis was confirmed when he visited some of the sites on a tour of the Near East in the same year. On his return to England, Sayce presented a lecture to the Society of Biblical Archaeology in London, where he announced that the Hittites where a much more influential culture than previously thought with their own art and language. Sayce concluded that the Hittite hieroglyphic system was predominantly a syllabary, that is, its symbols stood for a phonetic syllable. There were too many different signs for a system, that was alphabetical and yet there were too few for it to be a set of ideographs. That very sign standing for the divinity had appeared on the stones of Hamath and other places, always in the form of a prefix of an indecipherable group of hieroglyphics naming the deities. This led Sayce to conclude that by finding the name of one of these deities with the help of another language endowed with similar pronunciation, one might analyse the conversion of the aforesaid name in Hittite hieroglyphics. Also, he stated that the keys to be obtained through that process might in turn be applied to other parts of a Hittite inscription where the same sign were to occur.
From the early 1880s, Sayce spent most of his winters in Egypt due to his poor health, and became interested in the archaeology of the region. Sayce was friends with Flinders Petrie and worked on cuneiform inscriptions discovered by Petrie at Tel el Amarna.
He worked at El Kab in Egypt with Somers Clarke in the 1900s. In his seasonal winter digs in Egypt he always hired a well-furnished boat on the Nile to accommodate his travelling library, which also enabled him to offer tea to visiting Egyptologists like the young American James Henry Breasted and his wife.
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