Riekele or Rykle Borger (born 24 May 1929, Wiuwert, the Netherlands;[1] died 27 December 2010, Göttingen, Germany) was a notable Dutch Assyriologist educated in the German tradition.
This experience led Borger to think of himself as a foundational philologist, and his lifelong commitment was to creating detailed and accurate reference works to support and advance the discipline of Assyriology.
Wilfred Lambert of the University of Birmingham, author of the notable anthology, Babylonian Wisdom Literature (1960), and one of the leading cuneiform experts in the world, was a close associate and collaborator of Borger's.
Rykle Borger was never able to complete his one great ambition—the creation of a Sumero-Akkadian Lexikon based solely on the ancient Mesopotamian bilingual texts.
Yet he was an indefatigable scholar of ancient Mesopotamian and Semitic languages, and did produce foundational works necessary for the advance of Assyriology as a discipline.