Ada Yardeni

Ada Yardeni was born in 1937 in Jerusalem

Ada Yardeni was born in Jerusalem in 1937. Her father, Menahem Zulay, was a scholar of Hebrew piyyut, and her mother, Ilse Zulay, taught piano. She lost her father at 17.

She studied graphic art at the Bezalel school of art. From 1976 she studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in the Hebrew department and then in Semitic languages through her doctorate. Her doctoral work examined Aramaic and Hebrew cursive documents from Wadi Murabba'at and Nahal Hever.

She worked on Hebrew letter design, including the Koren letters and a typeface named Ada after her. In 1986 she was an editor at the Academy of the Hebrew Language and deciphered the priestly blessing on ancient amulets. The Israel Museum displayed them without naming her, and she protested.

She wrote books and many papers on Hebrew script and on scrolls and inscriptions, including volumes of Aramaic documents from ancient Egypt with Bezalel Porten. From 1990 she was part of a team preparing a corpus of inscriptions of Judaea and Palestine. She also translated, including her father's German doctorate, published in 2010.

In 2018 she studied the Ishmael Papyrus. She died in 2018.