News and Events
Mesopotamian Seminar Series
The Mesopotamian Seminar Series is the weekly term time event for those interested in the Ancient Near East. Previously hosted at Trinity College by Professor Postgate, our new lecture series has been held at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research since 2010. This move reflects the recent combination of Assyriology and Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology within the Department of Archaeology.
With visiting speakers coming from universities, museums and other institutions from around the world, it is hoped that these evenings will continue to offer a focus for the wide range of Assyriological and Ancient Near Eastern archaeological projects across the University, build links with other research centres, and offer a chance for all to see the incredible work that is being carried out in this vast and hugely important field of research.
Evening lectures take place on Tuesday evenings at 5pm, and will be followed by a short reception for our guest speakers and those in attendance.
Location: Seminar Room, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Downing Site
More information can be found at: http://www.mcdonald.cam.ac.uk/events/meso/.
Any questions should be directed to Adam Stone, abs27@cam.ac.uk
Events 2011-2012
Easter Term, 2012
1st May
Ruth Horry (HPS, University of Cambridge): Doctors, divination and museum displays: the multiple lives of a Babylonian clay liver model
8th May
DT Potts (Edwin Cuthbert Hall Professor of Middle Eastern Archaeology, University of Sydney): From sedentism to nomadism: Transformations in Iranian history and prehistory
15th May
Mark Altaweel (Lecturer in Near Eastern Archaeology, UCL): New Investigations in the Iraqi Hilly Flanks: Social-Environmental and Historical Investigations from 2009-2012
12th June
Professor Elizabeth Stone and Professor Paul Zimansky (State University of New York, Stony Brook): Tell Sakhariya and the Urban Matrix of Mesopotamia
Past lectures:
2012
Alan Greaves (Lecturer in Archaeology, University of Liverpool): John Garstang's Work in Turkey - and the New Exhibition at the University of Liverpool (31st January)
Graham Philip (Professor of Archaeology, Durham University): Exploiting the Landscape of the Levant: a long-term perspective (7th February)
Caroline Waerzeggers (Lecturer in the Ancient Near East, UCL): Babylonia in the 1st Millennium (14th February)
Karen Sonik (Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles): Frontality and the Gaze in Mesopotamian Art (21st February)
Greta Van Buylaere (Research Fellow, Assyrian-Babylonian Scholarly Literacies, University Cambridge): Assyrian and Babylonian Scholarly Literacies (6th March)
Assaad Seif (Co-ordinator of Archaeological Research, Ministry of Culture, Lebanon): Paradigm Shifts and the Politics of the Past in Lebanon: Urban Archaeology in the Making (13th March)
2011
Tony Wilkinson (Professor of Archaeology, University of Durham): Upper Mesopotamian Trajectories: Settlement and Community within a Fragile Environment (25th January)
David Wengrow (Reader in Comparative Archaeology, UCL): Why did cross-cultural trade matter in the ancient Near East? (1st February)
Alasdair Livingstone (Reader in Assyriology, University of Birmingham): Hemerologies (15th February)
Ronan Head (Research Fellow in Ancient Law, Brigham Young University): The Babylonian Merchant-Slave (22nd February)
Frances Reynolds (Shillito Fellow in Assyriology, University of Oxford): Chaos in Akkadian Myth and Ritual (1st March)
Yoram Cohen (Dept of Archaeology and Near Eastern Cultures, Tel Aviv University): The Emar Scribal School (10th May)
Jon Taylor (Assistant Keeper of the Cuneiform Collections, British Museum): Squeezed, broken and lovingly preserved: Neo-Babylonian copies of ancient inscriptions (24th May)
Ilya Yakubovich (Fellow in Indo-Iranian Philology at the University of Oxford): Reconstructing multilingualism in ancient societies (11th October)
Christopher Metcalf (University of Oxford): New parallels in Hittite and Sumerian praise of the Sun (18th October)
Johanna Tudeau (University of Cambridge): Architectural planning in Assyria according to the royal inscriptions, state archives and omen series (1st November)
Marie-Françoise Besnier (Research Fellow, The Geography of Knowledge in Assyria and Babylonia, University of Cambridge): The Transmission of Divinatory series and their "Standardization" throughout second and first Millennia: the Examples of šumma izbu and ālu Series (22nd November)
David Wengrow (Reader in Comparative Archaeology, UCL): Images between worlds: Egypt and Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium BC (29th November)
2010
Andrew George (Professor of Babylonian, SOAS, University of London): Translating Gilgamesh (1st February)
Yağmur Sarıoğlu (Doctoral Candidate, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge): Texts Meet Archaeology: Ritual Vessels in Anatolian Domestic Cults in the 2nd Millennium B.C. (8th February)
John MacGinnis (Research Fellow, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge): Sun readers are not all the same: investigating the archives of the Neo-Babylonian Shamash Temple in Sippar (22nd February)
Luis Siddall (Doctoral Candidate SOAS, University of London): A New(ish) stele of the Assyrian king, Adad-nirari III and what it can tell us about text genre and chronology (1st March)
Jacob Lauinger (Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Research Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge): Following the Man of Yamhad: Alalakh and Syria in the Late Old Babylonian Period (26th April)
Stephanie Dalley (Senior Research Fellow in Assyriology, Faculty of Oriental Studies, Oxford University): Kish according to Cuneiform Sources: Overview of an Overview (10th May)
Roger Matthews (Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology, UCL): The Central Zagros Archaeological Project: new research into Neolithic society of west Iran (24th May)
Francesca Rochberg (Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley): Cultural Matrix for Babylonian Astral Science in the Hellenistic World (31st May)
Nicole Brisch (University Lecturer in Assyriology, University of Cambridge): Letters to the Gods: Royal Letters of Petition as a Genre of Sumerian Scholarly Literature (26th October)
Jacob Dahl (University Lecturer in Assyriology, University of Oxford): Early Writing in the Ancient Near East (2nd November)
Johannes Haubold (Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Durham): The Barbarian Writes Back: Reading Berossos (16th November)
Mark Weeden (British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow, SOAS): Tabal and the Limits of Assyrian Imperialism (23rd November)