Contributors

Kathleen Abraham is Professor of Hebrew and Ancient Semitic languages at the University of Leuven, and previously at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. She studies and publishes primary sources that shed light on the cultural history of Babylonia in the first millennium BCE, having a strong interest in the linguistic and social consequences of (forced) migration from the Levant at the time.
Ahmad al-Jallad holds the Sofia Chair in Arabic Studies at Ohio State University and specialises in the history, language, and cultures of pre-Islamic Arabia.
Heather D. Baker is Associate Professor of Ancient Near Eastern History at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the social, economic, and political history of Assyria and Babylonia in the first millennium BCE, on Mesopotamian urbanism, and on the integration of textual and archaeological data.
Paola Corò is Associate Professor of Assyriology at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She combines an expertise in Assyriology with a background in Classics. Her research focuses on first millennium BCE Mesopotamia, especially cuneiform texts from the Hellenistic period. She is the author of Prebende templari in età seleucide (2005) and Seleucid Tablets from Uruk in the British Museum: Text Editions and Commentary (2018). She currently directs a Ca’ Foscari-funded research project that, through a machine-learning and computer vision approach to the study of clay tablets, investigates the role and functions of ‘firing holes’ in the cuneiform texts from the Library of Ashurbanipal.
Laura Cousin studied Assyriology at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She received her PhD in 2016 for a dissertation titled ‘Babylon, City of the King in the First Millennium BCE’. She is an associate member of the UMR 7041 ArScAN-HAROC (Nanterre, France).
Uri Gabbay is Professor of Assyriology in the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near East of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He teaches Sumerian, Akkadian, and the culture and religion of Ancient Mesopotamia. His research focuses on Sumerian prayers and on Akkadian commentaries of the first millennium BCE.
Julia Gießler is an Assyriologist specialising in Neo- and Late Babylonian sources. She studied at the University of Marburg and wrote her PhD at Freie Universität Berlin on tattoos, brandings, and other forms of body marks on humans and animals in Mesopotamia. During her work for the prosopographical online database Prosobab, she developed a keen interest in Babylonian onomastics.
Steffie van Gompel conducts PhD research into ancient Egyptian marriage and family structures at Leiden University. Her research interests include legal documents and legal traditions in Ancient Egypt and the Ancient Near East, daily life in ancient Mediterranean societies, and historical family systems in Eurasia.
Elynn Gorris is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie global fellow at the Catholic University of Louvain and Macquarie University. She specialises in the language and history of the Neo-Elamite kingdom and the broader Upper Persian Gulf region, and focuses on Neo-Elamite trade networks in her MSCA research project. She recently published a monograph: Power and Politics in the Neo-Elamite Kingdom (2020).
Melanie M. Groß is an Assyriologist specialising in the socio-economic history of first millennium BCE Mesopotamia. She recently published the monograph At the Heart of an Empire: The Royal Household in the Neo-Assyrian Period (2020). Together with Caroline Waerzeggers, she directs Prosobab, an online prosopography of Babylonia (620–330 BCE).
Francis Joannès is Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and a member of the research team Histoire et Archéologie de l’Orient cunéiforme within the Unité Mixte de Recherche Archéologies et Sciences de l’Antiquité du CNRS (MSH-Mondes, Nanterre), with a specialisation in the socio-economic history and cultural aspects of Babylonia in the first millennium BCE. He is currently working on the material culture of Babylonia and manages the ‘Babylonian Texts’ section of Achemenet.com, a website dedicated to the online publication of Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid cuneiform documentation.
Michael Jursa is Professor of Assyriology at the University of Vienna. His main research interest is the socio-economic history of Babylonia, in particular in the first millennium BCE.
John P. Nielsen received his PhD from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and is Associate Professor in the History Department at Bradley University. He is the author of Sons and Descendants: A Social History of Kin Groups and Family Names in the Early Neo-Babylonian Period (747–626 BC) (2011), Early Neo-Babylonian Personal Names from Legal and Administrative Documents (747–626 BCE) (2015), and The Reign of Nebuchadnezzar I in History and Historical Memory (2018), as well as several articles and book chapters.
Zsolt Simon is Research Fellow at the Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, co-author of the Digital Philological-Etymological Dictionary of the Minor Ancient Anatolian Corpus Languages, and co-editor of the Hungarian Assyriological Review. He was formerly Sasakawa Research Fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Junior Research Fellow at the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (Koç University, Istanbul), TÜBITAK Research Fellow (Koç University), and Research Fellow at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
Rieneke Sonnevelt carries out doctoral research at Leiden University on the spread and use of Aramaic in Babylonia during the first millennium BCE. Her thesis focuses on alphabetic epigraphs found on cuneiform clay tablets, the main direct Aramaic source from Babylonia during this period, and the socio-economic context in which they appear.
Jan Tavernier is Professor in Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium). His main research axes are, inter alia, Elamite history and philology, Old Persian history and philology, and the linguistic history of the Achaemenid Empire.
Cornell Thissen is an independent researcher and graduate of the VU University Amsterdam. He is currently finishing his PhD thesis, under the supervision of Professor Kristin Kleber, on the orthography of Babylonian names.
Caroline Waerzeggers is Professor of Assyriology at Leiden University, specialising in the social and cultural history of Babylonia in the first millennium BCE. Together with Melanie M. Groß, she directs Prosobab, an online prosopography of Babylonia (620–330 BCE).
Yoko Watai is currently a visiting researcher at the Institute of Cultural Sciences of Chuo University in Tokyo, a non-permanent member of the research team Histoire et Archéologie de l’Orient cunéiforme within the Unité Mixte de Recherche Archéologies et Sciences de l’Antiquité of CNRS, and a part-time lecturer at several universities in Japan. She received her PhD from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2012, and was a postdoctoral fellow financed by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) from 2016 to 2019. Since 2019, her research project on economic activities of women in first-millennium Babylonia has been financed by JSPS Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI, Grant Number JP 19K13361).
Ran Zadok is Professor Emeritus of Mesopotamian, Iranian, and Judaic studies at Tel Aviv University. He specialises in the history and philology of the Fertile Crescent, especially (but not exclusively) Mesopotamia and western Iran, between 1200 and 330 BCE.

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