Teaching Staff
University teaching in Akkadian and Sumerian language, literature and culture is given by Prof. J. Nicholas Postgate, Dr. Nicole Brisch and Dr. Eleanor Robson. University teaching in Mesopotamian archaeology and history is given by Dr. Augusta McMahon. These staff members also give most of the College undergraduate supervisions in ancient Near Eastern subjects, supplemented by assistance from advanced PhD students. All staff members have ongoing research projects in the archaeology, social history and languages of Mesopotamia and are able and willing to supervise M.Phil and Ph.D students in a wide range of topics.
Augusta McMahon
Augusta McMahon is University Senior Lecturer in Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology and History in the Department of Archaeology and a Fellow of Newnham College. She is also Graduate Officer and Assyriology Course Coordinator in the Department of Archaeology.
She has excavated in Iraq, at the major sites of Nippur and Nineveh, and also in Syria, Turkey and Yemen. Since 2006 she has been Field Director of the Tell Brak Excavation in northeast Syria and previously was Co-Director of excavations at Chagar Bazar in Syria from 1999 to 2002.
Her research interests include urbanization and early complexity, early state warfare, artifact and site biographies and material culture. Her recent publications include Nippur V: The Early Dynastic to Akkadian Transition (2006) and Once There Was a Place: Settlement Archaeology at Chagar Bazar, 1999-2002 (2009). She is currently a member of the Publications Committee of the British Institute for the Study of Iraq and Managing Committee of the Council for British Research in the Levant.
Contact details: amm36@cam.ac.uk
Nicholas Postgate
Nicholas Postgate is Professor of Assyriology in the Department of Archaeology and a Fellow of Trinity College. He works on the social and economic history of Mesopotamia, especially Assyria. He was Director of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq (Baghdad) during the 1970s and conducted excavations at the Sumerian city of Abu Salabikh, in southern Iraq, from 1975 to 1989.
From 1994 to 1998, he directed the excavation of the Bronze and Iron Age site of Kilise Tepe in southern Turkey, and this project resumed in 2007.
Apart from excavation reports and editions of cuneiform texts, his books include The First Empires (1977) and Early Mesopotamia: society and economy at the dawn of history (1992). He is currently on the Council of the British Institute for the Study of Iraq. He holds a three-year Leverhulme Research Fellowship from October 2009 but may still be available to supervise PhD students.
Contact details: jnp10@cam.ac.uk
Nicole Brisch
Nicole Brisch holds a three-year Lectureship in Assyriology in the Department of Archaeology from October 2009.
Her current research involves a comprehensive new study of the deification of kings in early Mesopotamia. A close connection between religion and political power can be observed throughout human history. This project, which is inspired by an international conference that she organized at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago in 2007, will aim at studying the phenomenon of kings as gods within their historical, socio-economic, and religious settings to further elucidate the factors that contributed to this relatively short-lived phenomenon.
This research project involves publishing cuneiform tablets from the Old Babylonian period (c. 2000-1595 BCE), which provide lists of sacrifices at the religious and cultural centre of early Mesopotamia, the city of Nippur. These texts, the large majority of which have never been published in the form of line drawings or photographs, will be a key for studying the ancient Mesopotamian notion of sacrifice, in particular sacrifices to royal and divine statues, and will thus also offer a possibility at re-studying the nature of Mesopotamian statues from a philological rather than an art historical point of view. This research project will be conducted in part with the support of the American Schools of Oriental Studies and in collaboration with the Freie Universität Berlin.
Her research interests include Mesopotamian literature and genre, the socio-economic history of the Ur III period (2100-2000 BCE), and Mesopotamian religion.
Contact details: nmb42@cam.ac.uk
Eleanor Robson
Eleanor Robson is Reader in Ancient Middle Eastern Science at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, where she teaches a range of lecture courses on Mesopotamian intellectual history, classical Islamic science, the anthropology of science, and the history of Assyriology. She also teaches some Akkadian and Sumerian language and Mesopotamian history for Part IIb and the MPhil in Archaeology and Anthropology. She is Vice-Chair of the British Institute for the Study of Iraq.
Her research interests centre round the socio-political history of science and scholarship in ancient Mesopotamia. Her books include Mesopotamian Mathematics, 2100-1600 BC (Oxford, 1999) and Mathematics in Ancient Iraq: a Social History (Princeton, 2008). She has also edited or co-edited several other books, including The Literature of Ancient Sumer, with Jeremy Black, Graham Cunningham, and Gábor Zólyomi (Oxford, 2004) and, most recently The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture, with Karen Radner (Oxford, forthcoming 2010).
She runs an AHRC-funded research project, The Geography of Knowledge in Assyria and Babylonia, 700-200 BC, which runs from 2007 to 2012. Its aim is to make a comparative study of four scholarly libraries of cuneiform tablets in order to better understand the circumstances in which knowledge was produced and circulated in the first millennium BC. As part of that project, she is working with Marie-Françoise Besnier, Graham Cunningham, Steve Tinney, Greta Van Buylaere and others to create the online Corpus of Ancient Mesopotamian Scholarship.
Contact details: er264@cam.ac.uk