Friedrich Cornelius
Friedrich Cornelius (2 July 1893 – 8 January 1976) was a German historian who specialized in ancient history. Biography. Friedrich Cornelius was born in Munich, Germany on 2 July 1893. He was the son of Hans Cornelius, grandson of Carl Adolph Cornelius, great-nephew of Peter Cornelius and great-great-nephew of Peter von Cornelius. He gained his abitur at the Wilhelmsgymnasium in Munich in 1912, and subsequently studied history at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He served in the German Army during World War I, and gained his Ph.D. in history at Munich in 1919. After gaining  his Ph.D., Cornelius worked as a freelance writer for many years. He joined the Nazi Party in July 1930 and subsequently became Ortsgruppenleiter and Mayor of Garching bei München. He completed his habilitation on Roman history at the University of Würzburg in 1939 under the supervision of Alexander Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. During World War II, Cornelius worked at the Institute for Research on the Jewish Question. During this time, Cornelius authored a work on Erich Ludendorff, and with Walter Eckhardt he wrote a multi-volume series on the early history of the Germanic peoples. Both works were banned in  the Soviet occupation zone in the aftermath of the war. Since 1957, Cornelius lectured on the ancient history of the Near East at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Following the retirement of at Munich he lectured on religion in classical antiquity. Cornelius is well known for having used cuneiform tablets to correctly estimate the years in which Hammurabi reigned. He was the author of a number of works which covered a diverse set of topics, including the histories of Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, the Germanic peoples and the Hittites, and Germanic and Indo-European religion. Cornelius died in Schondorf  am Ammersee, Germany on 8 January 1976.