Yusif Yusifov

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Yusif Bahlul oglu Yusifov (23 September 1929 – 4 January 1998) was an Azerbaijani and Soviet historian, linguist, toponymist, orientalist and turkologist. He was a leading expert on ancient languages, especially Sumerian and Akkadian, and studied Elam, Media, Assyria and Urartu.

He was born in Boyuk-Vedi, in what was then the Soviet Union. After finishing the Azerbaijan Pedagogical School in Yerevan in 1946, he studied at Leningrad University, learning ancient oriental languages and Iranian philology, and graduated in 1952. He began his career at the Azerbaijan Academy of Sciences and, from 1953 to 1956, studied as a postgrad at the State Hermitage in Leningrad under I. M. Dyakonov, specializing in Elam. His two important Elam articles and his PhD thesis, defended in 1958, helped make him a recognized Elam scholar.

From 1958 to 1967 he worked at the Institute of History of the Azerbaijan Academy of Sciences. In 1965 he completed a doctoral thesis on the socio-economic history of Elam, and in 1968 his monograph on that topic was published in Moscow. In 1967 he began teaching at the Azerbaijan Pedagogical Institute and, from 1971 until his death, served as Head of Department and Dean of the Faculty at the Azerbaijan State Pedagogical University.

In 1993 he published History of the Ancient East for higher education, and he co-authored several history books. Yusifov died in Baku on 4 January 1998. He left a lasting legacy in Azerbaijani historical science and Oriental studies, with his students continuing his work.