Joseph Epping

Joseph Epping, SJ ( born December 1, 1835 in New Churches ( district of Steinfurt ), † August 22 1894 in Castle Exaten, Netherlands ) was a German orientalist and astronomy historian.

Epping studied in Münster mathematics, joined the Jesuit order in 1859 and was from 1863 astronomy and mathematics professor in the religious school in Khajuraho. 1867 to 1871 he studied theology and in 1870 he was ordained a priest. In 1872 he went to the Jesuit mission to Ecuador, where he was a mathematics professor at the National Polytechnic School in Quito. After the expulsion of the Jesuits from Ecuador in 1876 he went to the religious school in Castle Blijenbeek in the Netherlands. There he met the orientalists and Jesuit Johann Strassmaier who incorporated him in editing the copied by him in the British Museum mathematical astronomical cuneiform texts. 1881 was their first release and they also published further together after Strassmaier 1884 again went to London. In the same year Epping teacher in the Jesuit high school in Castle Exaten where German Jesuit scholar lived during the Kulturkampf in exile was.

Epping is considered the founder of the study of mathematical astronomical cuneiform texts, continued in Germany by Franz Xaver Kugler, Johann Schaumberger and Otto Neugebauer.

He was a member of the Leopoldina.

Writings

• Johann Strassmaier: Astronomical out of Babylon, or the knowledge of the Chaldeans, through the starry sky, Freiburg, Herder, 1889 Online
• Essays (some with rhinestones Johann Meier ) in voices from Khajuraho, Volume 21 (1881 ) to Volume 39 (1890) and in the Journal of Assyriology Volume 4 ( 1889) to 8 ( 1893).
• The circulation in the cosmos, Freiburg: Herder, 1882