Researchers
Dr Marie-Françoise Besnier
Research Fellow, The Geography of Knowledge in Assyria and Babylonia.
Marie-Françoise Besnier is a Research Fellow in the project entitled Geography of Knowledge in Assyria and Babylonia (GKAB - Department of History and Philosophy of Science), directed by Eleanor Robson. Her main function so far in the project is the transliteration and translation of texts of the omen corpus, mainly Šumma ālu, Šumma izbu and the series Iqqur īpuš. She also gives supervisions for first-year students in Akkadian.
The subject of her PhD dissertation was Gardens in the Ancient Near East, from the End of the Third Millennium to the Middle of the First Millennium BC. It was defended in Paris (EHESS) in December 2003 (publication forthcoming).
She is also a member of the project entitled "La Mésopotamie et sa périphérie: transmissions et adaptations d'une culture au Bronze Récent" ("Mespériph", France CNRS), directed by Carole Roche; and collaborates in a project devoted to the flora of Ugarit (directed by Robert Hawley).
She is a member of the Tell Kazel (Syria) excavation team, directed by Leila Badre, where she is in charge of the cataloguing since 1995.
Contact details: mfb29@cam.ac.uk
Dr Carlo Colantoni
Research Associate, Kilise Tepe Archaeological Project
Dr Harriet Crawford
Fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
She has directed fieldwork in Kuwait and Bahrain and is the author of Sumer and the Sumerians (1991, 2004) and Dilmun and Its Gulf Neighbours (1998).
Dr Graham Cunningham
Former Research Fellow, Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
Graham Cunningham's academic interests have followed an interdisciplinary path, beginning in English literature, progressing to Classics, and concluding in the ancient Middle East, whose cultural and linguistic history is the principal focus of his research.
He has worked on two of the major publishing projects related to the literature and languages of the ancient Middle East, A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian (1999), the first complete Akkadian-English dictionary, and The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (1997-2006), the first searchable online corpus of texts in an ancient Middle Eastern language, a project which he brought to a successful conclusion following the death of its founding director.
The online corpus resulted in two joint print publications, The Literature of Ancient Sumer (2004) and Analysing Literary Sumerian: Corpus-based Approaches (2007). His own books have focused more on religion, both in relation to the ancient Middle East, as in 'Deliver me from evil': Mesopotamian Incantations 2500-1500 BC (1997), and from a broader anthropological perspective, as in Religion and Magic: Approaches and Theories (1999).
Most recently he was a member of The Geography of Knowledge project, analysing the construction and distribution of knowledge in the Middle East during the first millennium BC.
Contact details: gc379@cam.ac.uk
James Kinnier Wilson
Formerly Eric Yarrow Lecturer in Assyriology
He was the University's Assyriologist from 1955 till 1989, teaching Akkadian and Sumerian. He is author of several books, including an edition of the Etana myth.
Dr John MacGinnis
Research Fellow, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
John MacGinnis's academic interests revolve primarily around Mesopotamian civilisation of the first millennium BC. He is interested in work which seeks to integrate the evidence of both archaeology and epigraphy for the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid empires. For many years he has researched the Neo-Babylonian/Achaemenid archives of the Ebabbara, the temple of the sun god Shamash in Sippar (south of modern Baghdad) and has published extensively in this field. He has also been working for over a decade at the site of Ziyaret Tepe in southeastern Turkey, now identified as the Neo-Assyrian provincial capital of Tushan, where he is both project epigrapher and directs excavations in the lower town.
Contact details: jm111@cam.ac.uk
Dr Joan Oates
Fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
She is the Director of the Tell Brak Excavation in Syria, where she has worked since 1981; she has previously excavated in Iraq at Choga Mami, Nippur and Nimrud. Her extensive list of publications include Nimrud, An Assyrian Imperial City Revealed (2001, with D. Oates) and Excavations at Tell Brak, Volumes 1 and 2 (1997 and 2001, with D. Oates & H. McDonald).
Dr Timothy Potts
Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum.
He is a specialist in the art and archaeology of the ancient Near East. He was the Co-Director of the University of Sydney excavations at Pella in Jordan and is the author of Mesopotamia and the East, An Archaeological and Historical Study of Foreign Relations 3400-2000 BC (1994).