Neilson Carel Debevoise (November 8, 1903 – December 10, 1992) was an American historian of ancient Mesopotamia and Iran, and subsequently a military intelligence officer.
[1] Born in 1903 in Jersey City, he studied at the University of Illinois, where he completed his doctoral dissertation, "Parthian Problems", under the supervision of Albert Ten Eyck Olmstead in 1929.
[1] Debevoise's Political History of Parthia was the first comprehensive history of the Parthian Empire to be written since George Rawlinson's The Sixth Great Oriental Monarchy (1873), published 65 years previously.
In 2008, Valery P. Nikonorov published a Russian translation of the Political History with an extensive bibliographical supplement on scholarship on the empire since 1938.
[1] In his introduction to the translation, Nikonorov calls Debevoise's work "totally unique for its time",[6] and praises the book for its "high scientific level" and "breadth of coverage and depth of interpretation".