Rav Ashi רב אשי
head of the academy at Sura who began the redaction of the Babylonian Talmud
By tradition Rav Ashi was born in the year Rava died: one generation replaces another without a gap. He headed the academy of Sura and restored its greatness; in Mata Mechasya, its suburb, thousands gathered for the kallah months.
His work was redaction. By his time Babylonian learning had accumulated seven centuries of argument — Rav and Shmuel, Abaye and Rava, dozens of schools, thousands of traditions — all held orally and in danger of scattering. With his students Rav Ashi began to go through the material systematically: two tractates a year, twice over in his sixty years of leadership. He did not merely collect: he decided which mishnah opens a subject, how a dispute is arranged, where discussion ends.
The Talmud says of him what it says of Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi — that Torah and worldly standing had not been joined in one place since Rabbi until Rav Ashi.
He did not finish. His students continued, and tradition assigns the sealing to Ravina, around the year 4260.