This article examines the description of Persepolis, one of the capital cities of the Achaemenid Persian Empire (ca. 550–330 BCE), by Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri (1651–1725) in his illustrated travelogue Giro del mondo (1699–1700). Gemelli Careri’s extensive description of the site—some twenty pages of text accompanied by two plates en…[Read more]

The motif in the centre of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor (ca. 2000-1900 BCE) concerns a star that fell to earth and caused the extinction of a population of giant serpents on an enchanted island, whose location is traditionally ascribed to the Red Sea. These creatures could apparently breathe fire, but they themselves…[Read more]

Ancient pseudo-histories may contain kernels of geographic truth. In the Sumerian King List (SKL) the long and south-focused antediluvian era may reflect a combination of the Ubaid and Uruk periods, while the initial post-Flood period, which was short and ruled from the north, may reflect the Jemdet Nasr phase. The SKL’s subsequent return of k…[Read more]

Linguistic studies in Egyptology, Assyriology and Biblical Studies harbour a persistent trope in which the inhabitants of the Ancient Near East and Egypt are believed to have visualised the past as in front of them and the future as behind them. Analyses of the spatial conceptualisation of time in language have revealed that the opposite is true…[Read more]

The practice of a king appointing his daughter as the High Priestess and consort of an important male deity arose independently in the Ancient Near East and Egypt. In Mesopotamia, the prime example of such an appointee was the EN-priestess of Nanna (EPN) at Ur; in Egypt, its most important embodiment was the God’s Wife of Amun (GWA) at Thebes. B…[Read more]

In 1st Dynasty Egypt (ca. 3000 BCE), mudbrick architecture may have been influenced by existing Mesopotamian practices such as the complex niching of monumental façades. From the 1st to 3rd Dynasties, the niches of some mudbrick mastabas at Saqqara were painted with brightly-coloured geometric designs in a clear imitation of woven reed matting.…[Read more]

The Assyrian King List (AKL) is central to the reconstruction of Assyrian and broader Near Eastern history and chronology. Because of AKL’s significance, locating its original moment of composition has far-reaching historiographical implications. There is no scholarly consensus on the dating of AKL, but a closer look at the internal evidence of A…[Read more]

The present study draws on interdisciplinary research to establish an interpretative framework for an analysis of the material and textual evidence concerning infant loss in ancient Mesopotamia (c. 3000-500 BCE). This approach rejects the notion that highinfant mortality rates result in widespread parental indifference to infant loss, arguing…[Read more]

The meaning of the Akkadian term ṭuppi has been hotly debated by Assyriologists for the greater part of a century. The present article argues that ṭuppi, commonly found in temporal expressions, can only refer to a one-year period. This proposal arises out of the observation that, among a substantial corpus of Neo-Babylonian house rental con…[Read more]

Cuneiform scholarly practices systematized an exploration of mean- ing potential. In cuneiform scholarship, knowledge making emerged from multiple scribal practices, most notably list-making, analogical reasoning, and translation. The present paper demonstrates how multilingualism stands at the core of cuneiform scholarly inquiry, enabling…[Read more]

This essay examines what the paradigm of ‘globalization’ can tell us about the Achaemenid Persian Empire (c. 550-330 BCE).

This essay examines what the paradigm of ‘globalization’ can tell us about the Achaemenid Persian Empire (c. 550-330 BCE).

The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between dwelling size, household structure and social status in urban Babylonia during the first millennium BC.

This paper examines the relationship between house and household in first-millennium BC Babylonia, drawing on both textual and archaeological evidence. It builds on previous research by the author which has focused on elucidating the Babylonian terms for parts of the house and correlating these with architectural forms, based on comparison with…[Read more]

This paper presents a newly funded international project for machine translation and automated analysis of ancient cuneiform 1 languages where NLP special ists and Assyriologists collaborate to create an information retrieval system for
Sumerian. This research is conceived in response to the need to translate large numbers of administrative texts…[Read more]

This paper evaluates the recent upsurge of interest in the scribal processes underlying the composition of Hittite ritual text and the implications of this evidence for understanding the compositional history of biblical rituals.

Edition of cuneiform tablet excavated at Büklükale on the western Kızılırmak in 2010.

First publication of two late period Elamite language cuneiform texts house in the Yale Babylonian Collection

In the Ba‘al Cycle’s description of the threshold separating the realms of the dead from that of the living, the key reference point is described as “the two tells (at) the boundary of the netherworld” (CAT 1.4 viii, 4). The specific word used to describe both topographical features is tl, the tell, an object well known in the archaeology of the…[Read more]