Notes on Contributors
Ilya Arkhipov is Associate Professor at the Institute of Oriental and Classical Studies of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow. His main fields of interest are the history of Old Babylonian Upper Mesopotamia and Akkadian vocabulary and grammar. His publications include a volume of texts from the Mari archives.
Gary Beckman is the George C. Cameron Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Cultures in the Department of Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan. He is Past President of the American Oriental Society and Associate Editor of the Society’s Journal. He has published widely on Hittite social organization and diplomacy and on Hittite religion. The focus of his current research is the reception and adaptation of Syro-Mesopotamian culture by the Hittites. His most recent book is The Hittite Gilgamesh (2019), an edition of the tablets of the epic recovered from the site of the Hittite capital, Hattusa.
Dominique Charpin is Professor, Chair of Mesopotamian Civilization, Collège de France (Paris), and the creator and editor-in-chief of the open-access database ArchiBab, which makes freely available online thousands of documents from the Old Babylonian period (2000–1600 BCE). He serves as an epigrapher for the archaeological excavations of Mari (Tell Hariri, Syria), Larsa (Tell Senkereh, Iraq), and Ur (Tell Muqqayar, Iraq). He is the Principal Investigator for the project “EcritUr: the city of Ur according to the texts of the Old Babylonian period,” (ANR, 2017–2021). His most recent books include Reading and Writing in Babylon (Cambridge, Ma., 2010), La vie méconnue des temples mésopotamiens (Paris, 2017), and “Tu es de mon sang!” Les alliances dans le Proche-Orient ancien (Paris, 2019). He is the (co-)editor of Revue d’ Assyriologie and of series such as Archives Royales de Mari and Mémoires de NABU.
Frederick M. Fales is Senior Professor of History of the Ancient Near East at the University of Udine, where he taught from 1992 to retirement in 2016. He also taught at the Universities of Venice and Padua. Specialist in the history and texts of the Assyrians and the Arameans, he published an updated edition of the Aramaic texts on clay tablets from Assyria (Rome, 1986) and the editio princeps of the cuneiform administrative texts from Nineveh (Helsinki 1992–1995, with J.N. Postgate). A historical summary of the period appeared in L’impero assiro: storia e amministrazione (Rome-Bari, 2001). He (co-)directed archaeological excavations in Iraq, Syria (where he discovered an archive of Assyrian and Aramaic tablets: Tell Shiukh Fawqani, 1994–1998, I–II, Padova 2005, with L. Bachelot) and Turkey. He has also been interested in the politics of antiquities in the Near East in the 1900s and beyond: Saccheggio in Mesopotamia (Udine, 2004, a history of the Baghdad Museum, from its creation in 1923 to its pillage in 2003), Quel treno per Baghdad (Milano, 2010, on the Berlin-Baghdad railway project during WW I).
Johannes Hackl received his PhD from the University of Vienna and is currently University Assistant in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Leipzig, Germany. His research interests include Ancient Near Eastern social and economic history, Babylonian diplomatics, epistolography and linguistics. He is presently preparing a book on the periodization of Neo-Babylonian (“Late Babylonian”).
Rebecca Hasselbach-Andee is Associate Professor of Comparative Semitics at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the reconstruction of the Semitic language family and individual Semitic languages, especially Akkadian, from a historical linguistic and typological perspective. In more recent work, she has also incorporated socio-linguistic approaches to Semitic languages.
Robert Hawley is directeur d’ études at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris, France), where he occupies the chair “Religions and cultures of the ancient Levant” in the religious studies section. He is currently working on the literary, scholarly and scribal traditions (especially those transmitted in an alphabetic script and in one of the Semitic languages) of the pre-Hellenistic Levantine civilizations of the second and first millennia BC, especially those from the Late Bronze kingdom of Ugarit, and from the Phoenician cities and Aramean kingdoms of the Iron age.
Christian W. Hess is an Assyriologist. His research focuses on Akkadian grammar, the development of literary languages, and the historical geography of Mesopotamia in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages.
John Huehnergard is Professor Emeritus, Department of Middle Eastern Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, and former Professor of Semitic Philology, Harvard University. He is the author of A Grammar of Akkadian and other works on Akkadian and Semitic grammar.
Stefan Jakob received the PhD degree from the University of Saarbrücken, Germany, with a thesis on offices and professions in the Middle Assyrian kingdom. He was a team member of various archaeological excavations in Syria and Egypt. He is currently a research assistant at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and he is working on unpublished literary texts of the second and first millennium BC from the Assyrian capital Assur. His scientific interests include Near Eastern history and chronology, administrative structures of the Assyrian Empire, and Assyrian-Babylonian palaeography.
Maksim Kalinin is Research Assistant at the Faculty of Humanities / Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies, HSE University (Moscow). He studies morphological semantics of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian dialects of Akkadian. He also works, together with Sergey Loesov and other colleagues, on the historical grammar of Aramaic languages. His other field of research is East Syriac classical literature.
Alexandra Kleinerman is a Research Associate at Cornell University. She received her PhD from the Johns Hopkins University in 2009. Her work focuses on scribal education in Sumerian during the Old Babylonian Period.
Leonid Kogan PhD (2001), Habil. (2020), is the head of the Ancient Near Eastern department of the Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies, HSE—National Research University, Moscow, Russia. Since mid-1990s, he has published extensively on the historical grammar of Akkadian, various aspects of comparative Semitics, as well as on the language and oral literature of the island of Soqotra.
N.J.C. (Bert) Kouwenberg held a research post at the University of Leiden until his retirement in 2004 and has worked on Akkadian language and Comparative Semitics. His main publications are Gemination in the Akkadian Verb (1997), The Akkadian Verb and its Semitic Background (2010) and A Grammar of Old Assyrian (2017).
Manfred Krebernik studied Classics, Semitic Philology and Assyriology in Munich. Since 1998 he is professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies and curator of the Hilprecht Collection at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena.
Martin Lang studied Theology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies, and holds a doctorate in Old Testament Studies and a habilitation in Assyriology. He is associate professor at the Department for Ancient History and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Innsbruck.
Sergey Loesov is Professor, Leading Research Fellow: Faculty of Humanities / Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies, HSE University (Moscow). He studies morphological semantics of various Akkadian dialects, working, together with his colleagues and students, towards a comprehensive history of Akkadian. He is also engaged in the fieldwork on Ṭuroyo, an unwritten contemporary Aramaic language still spoken in Upper Mesopotamia. He has also published grammatical studies of Old and Middle Aramaic corpora.
Florence Malbran-Labat turned to the ancient Near East after her classical studies. She taught Akkadian (EPHE-IVe section; University of Lyon-III; CSIC-Madrid; Institut Catholique de Paris, where she was director of the École des Langues et Civilisations de l’ Orient Ancien) and Elamite (École du Louvre). Epigraphist of the Mission Archéologique Syro-Française de Ras Shamra-Ugarit. Among her publications: Manuel de langue akkadienne (Leuven 2003), Lettres en akkadien de la “maison d’ Urtēnu” (Leuven 2016, in cooperation with Sylvie Lackenbacher), Les inscriptions royales de Suse (Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1995). She is currently working on unpublished texts from Susa and a re-edition of the Susian contracts published by Vincent Scheil in the MDP.
Matthias Müller is an Egyptologist (PhD in 2003 on Akkadian from Egypt), currently working as PostDoc for the DEChriM project at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society. Most recent publications cover Ancient Egyptian and Coptic text editions and Egyptian and Coptic grammar.
Regine Pruzsinszky is Professor of Assyriology at the University of Freiburg. Her research interests focus on cuneiform records from the late Bronze Age, the chronology of Mesopotamia, Ancient Near Eastern onomastic and the socio-cultural role of musicians. She is the author of Die Personennamen der Texte aus Emar (Bethesda MD, 2003), and Mesopotamian Chronology of the 2nd Millennium BCE. An Introduction to the Textual Evidence and Related Chronological Issues (Vienna, 2009). Among other edited books on the Mesopotamian Dark Age (Vienna, 2004) or on the role of musicians in the tradition of literary works (Vienna, 2010), she has co-edited a volume on Policies of Exchange, Political Systems and Modes of Interaction in the Aegean and the Near East in the 2nd Millennium B.C.E. (Vienna, 2015) together with Birgitta Eder.
Carole Roche-Hawley is directrice de recherche in the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique), in the UMR 8167 “Orient & Méditerranée” in Paris, France. Since 2006 she has been coordinator of epigraphic research for the French contingent of the archeological mission to Ras Shamra-Ugarit. In addition to Ugarit, her current research interests include the texts from Emar and from Susa (both from the second millennium BCE), and the long-lived tradition of employing deliberately archaizing Babylonian ceremonial script in various milieux throughout the Near East (in Babylonia and in Assyria, but also in the peripheral regions, from the second through the first millennia BCE).
Walter Sommerfeld is Professor of Assyriology at the University of Marburg, Germany (retired). Author of several books and articles on the cultures of ancient Mesopotamia in the third and second millennia BCE, especially on the early Akkadian tradition.
Michael P. Streck is Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Leipzig University. Fields of Interest: Akkadian Language and Literature, Semitic Languages, Ancient Nomadism, Man and Nature in the Ancient Near East. Editor-in-chief of the Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie 2004–2018.
Wilfred H. van Soldt is a Professor Emeritus of Assyriology at Leiden University. He is considered a specialist in the Middle Babylonian period and the Akkadian of Ugarit. He was the previous Editor in Chief of Brill’s Handbook of Oriental Studies—Ancient Near East series.
Juan-Pablo Vita is a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid. He works on Northwest Semitic languages (especially Ugaritic) and Akkadian (in particular peripheral Akkadian dialects), language contact, and the social and economic history of Syria and Canaan in the Late Bronze Age. He is also epigraphist of the Mission archéologique syro-française de Ras Shamra-Ougarit. His most recent monographs are Canaanite Scribes in the Amarna Letters (Ugarit-Verlag, 2015) and (in cooperation with Josef Tropper) Lehrbuch der ugaritischen Sprache (Zaphon, 2020).