Dieter Vieweger

He then attended a non-state-recognised educational institution of the Protestant Church in Saxony (Proseminar Moritzburg) where he passed his Reifeprüfung in 1976.

In 1986 he was awarded a doctorate based on his thesis The Specificity of the Vocation Narratives of Jeremiah and Ezekiel in the Context of Similar Units of the Old Testament PhD which was supervised by Siegfried Wagner and Wolfram Herrmann from the Karl Marx University Leipzig.

In 1989 he habilitated at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig with the thesis The Literary Relations between the Books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

In addition to teaching in Wuppertal, he studied Prehistory at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main from 1994 to 1998, which he completed with a doctorate titled "On the Chronology of the Necropolis of Tamassos-Lambertis" under Jens Lüning.

[2] The Department of "Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften" of the Bergische Universität Wuppertal awarded Dieter Vieweger an honorary doctorate in July 2009.

Since 2005 Dieter Vieweger has been the director of the German Protestant Institute for Archaeology in the Holy Land in Jerusalem and Amman (DEI/GPIA), with which he has been closely associated since 1992.

In March 2007, a close cooperation between the German Archaeological Institute and the DEI was initiated with a ceremony at the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin.

The aim of the project is to explore the diverse cultures from many millennia of human history in this geopolitically prominent landscape – the Wadi al-'Arab region.

Here, the history of Palestine from the Chalcolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages to the Classical and Early Medieval periods can be explored in an exemplary way.

[4] The archaeological exploration of the Wadi al-'Arab region around Tall Zira'a, which covers about 25 square kilometres, was led and published by Katja Soennecken and Patrick Leiverkus (both DEI).

Dieter Vieweger initiated and led the restoration and research project "Tourist development of the old excavation under the Erlöserkirche" in the Old City of Jerusalem.

In addition, the medieval (Ayyubid) fortification of Mount Zion was investigated and several early Roman houses were explored (Area III).

In 2021, in the garden of the Dormitio Abbey (Area IV), the DEI found, among other things, parts of an enormous fortification wall surrounding the medieval church and the associated monastery on Mount Zion, which were once the last bastion to be taken by Saladin during the conquest of Jerusalem.

This work was largely commissioned by the Biblical Archaeological Institute Wuppertal, including: Dieter Vieweger describes in the first three volumes of his work History of the Biblical World the history of the southern Levant from the beginnings of human settlement to the emergence of Rabbinic-Pharisaic Judaism and the early church in the 3rd century AD.

The work impressively relates the central historical events to the developments of the Christian, Jewish, Samaritan and Muslim communities.

Dieter Vieweger has been conducting a comparable project ("My homeland – My History") in cooperation between the DEI Jerusalem and the German school abroad Talitha Kumi, Bethlehem, since 2021.

Together with the 10th grade students, he visits famous pagan, Jewish, Christian and Muslim sites in Jericho, Bethlehem and Hebron.