Notes on Contributors

Ariel M. Bagg is private lecturer at the Assyriological Institute of the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg (Germany) and member of the Centre François Viète d'épistémologie et d'histoire des sciences et des techniques (Brest/Nantes, France). He is an Assyriologist and Civil Engineer specializing in ancient Near Eastern history of technology and historical geography of the first millennium. His publications include Assyrische Wasserbauten (2000), Die Orts- und Gewässernamen der neuassyrischen Zeit. Teil 1: Die Levante (2007), and Die Assyrer und das Westland (2011).

Paul-Alain Beaulieu received his PhD in Assyriology from Yale University in 1985 and held various research and teaching positions at Yale, Harvard, and the University of Notre Dame before joining the faculty of the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations in the University of Toronto in 2006. He has published extensively on the history and culture of Mesopotamia in the first millennium BCE, notably The Reign of Nabonidus, King of Babylon (556-539 BC) (1989) and The Pantheon of Uruk During the Neo-Babylonian Period (2003).

Aaron Michael Butts (PhD University of Chicago) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literatures at the Catholic University of America. His research focuses on the history, languages, and literature of Christianity in the Near East, including Arabic, Ethiopic, and especially Syriac Christianity. He is author of Language Change in the Wake of Empire: Syriac in its Greco-Roman Context (2016) and a co-editor of the Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (2011).

Greta Van Buylaere (PhD Udine 2009) studied Assyriology in Leuven, Heidelberg, Helsinki, and Udine. At present, she is a researcher in the project "Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals" directed by Daniel Schwemer at the University of Würzburg. She is interested in Assyrian and Babylonian literacy, and the political and intellectual history of first millennium BCE Mesopotamia in general.

Stephanie Dalley is an Assyriologist who taught Akkadian for thirty years at Oxford University, and has published Assyrian cuneiform tablets from Nimrud, Nineveh, Tell al-Rimah, Til Barsip, as well as Babylonian texts from Sippar and of the First Sealand Dynasty; also translations of the main myths and epics, Myths from Mesopotamia (1989), an analysis of the Assyrian background to the Hebrew Book of Esther, Esther's Revenge at Susa (2007), and The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced (2013).

Frederick Mario Fales, born in Baltimore in 1946, has been Full Professor of ancient Near Eastern History at the University of Udine (Italy) since 1994. His main scholarly interests concern Mesopotamia in the Neo-Assyrian period (10th-7th centuries BCE) and range from historical studies to editions of Assyrian and Aramaic texts. He has undertaken, and sometimes directed, archaeological activities in Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iraqi Kurdistan. He founded an international journal on Neo-Assyrian studies, the State Archives of Assyria Bulletin, and the monographic series History of the Ancient Near East (SARGON: Padua). His publications include twelve monographs, seven edited volumes, and some 170 articles. For bibliography up to 2011 see https://uniud.academia.edu/MarioFales.

Jeanette C. Fincke (PhD Würzburg: 1999; habilitation Heidelberg: 2006) has been conducting research on the British Museum's collection of Nineveh texts for its Ashurbanipal Library Project in the past years, concentrating on divinatory texts and tablets written in the Babylonian ductus. Her work resulted in producing new databases (see www.fincke-cuneiform.com/nineveh/index.htm) and several articles. Currently, she is chercheur for the ERC project Floriental at the Centre nationale de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, where she focuses on the pharmaceutical series URU.AN.NA from the first millennium BCE.

Eckart Frahm (PhD Göttingen 1996, habilitation Heidelberg 2007) is Professor of Assyriology at Yale University. His main research interests are Assyrian and Babylonian history and Mesopotamian scholarly texts of the first millennium BCE. Frahm is the author of numerous articles and five books: Einleitung in die Sanherib-Inschriften (1997), Keilschrifttexte aus Assur literarischen Inhalts, vol. 3 (2009), Neo-Babylonian Letters and Contracts from the Eanna Archive (2011, co-authored with Michael Jursa), Babylonian and Assyrian Text Commentaries: Origins of Interpretation (2011), and Geschichte des alten Mesopotamien (2013). In addition, he serves as director of the Cuneiform Commentaries Project (http://ccp.yale.edu).

Andreas Fuchs is Professor of Assyriology at the University of Tübingen and a specialist in Neo-Assyrian history. He is the author of Die Inschriften Sargons II. aus Khorsabad (1993), Die Annalen des Jahres 711 v. Chr. nach Prismenfragmenten aus Ninive und Assur (1998), and, together with Simo Parpola, The Correspondence of Sargon II, Part III (2001).

Stefan R. Hauser is Professor for "Archaeology of ancient Mediterranean cultures and their relations to the ancient Near East and Egypt" at the University of Konstanz (Germany). He is editor of Die Sichtbarkeit von Nomaden und saisonaler Besiedlung in der Archäologie (2006) and Ernst Herzfeld and the Development of Near Eastern Studies, 1900-1950 (2005; with A.C. Gunter), and author of Status, Tod und Ritual. Stadt- und Sozialstruktur Assurs in neuassyrischer Zeit (2012). He currently directs projects on burial practices and the art of the portrait in Palmyra and on religion and identity in Hellenistic Mesopotamia. A Handbook of the Arsacid Empire is in preparation.

Nils P. Heeßel is Professor of Assyriology at the Julius-Maximilians University Würzburg. He is a specialist for the Akkadian scholarly tradition, in particular for scientific and divinatory texts. His publications include Babylonisch-assyrische Diagnostik (2000), Pazuzu (2002), and Divinatorische Texte I and II (2007, 2012).

Stefan Jakob studied Assyriology, Near Eastern Archaeology, and Musicology at the University of Saarbrücken and received his PhD degree in 2000 for research on Middle Assyrian administration and social structure. Between 1992 and 2003 he served as a staff member of several excavation projects (Tell Chuera and Tell Shekh Hassan in Syria and Qantir/Pi-Ramesse in Egypt). Since 2004 he has been a research assistant in Assyriology at the Institute for Cultures and Languages of the Middle East, University of Heidelberg. His main interests are Middle Assyrian history and chronology. In recent years he also worked on Assyrian prayers and ritual texts.

Mogens Trolle Larsen, Emeritus Professor of Assyriology at the University of Copenhagen, is a specialist in the history and culture of the Old Assyrian period. His most recent book is Ancient Kanesh: A Merchant Colony in Bronze Age Anatolia (2015).

Mario Liverani is Emeritus Professor of History of the Ancient Near East at the University of Rome "La Sapienza." He is former director of the Institute of Near Eastern Studies, of the Department of Sciences of Antiquity, and of the Inter-University Center on the Ancient Sahara, in the same "Sapienza" University. He has received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Copenhagen and Madrid, is a honorary member of the American Oriental Society, and member of the Lincei National Academy (Rome), of the Academy of Sciences (Turin), and of the European Academy. He was a member of archaeological missions in Syria (Ebla, Terqa, Mozan), Turkey (Kurban, Arslantepe), Yemen (Baraqish), and Libya (Akakus). He is author of nineteen monographs and ca. 260 articles, and the editor of eight books.

Alasdair Livingstone is Reader in Assyriology at the University of Birmingham and a specialist in cuneiform scholarly and literary texts, especially from Assyria. His publications include Mystical and Mythological Explanatory Works of Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars (1986) and Hemerologies of Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars (2013).

Mikko Luukko studied Assyriology, Semitics, and Linguistics at the University of Helsinki and the Freie Universität Berlin. In 2004, he gained his PhD from Helsinki, with a study of "Grammatical Variation in Neo-Assyrian." Luukko is currently working on a research project entitled "Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-witchcraft Rituals," directed by Daniel Schwemer at the University of Würzburg. He has published monographs and articles on Neo-Assyrian letters and Assyrian grammar, including The Correspondence of Tiglath-pileser III (2013).

Stefan M. Maul is Professor of Assyriology at the University of Heidelberg. His research focuses on Assyrian and Babylonian religion and intellectual life; over the past years, his main project has been the edition of the literary and scholarly texts from Ashur. Maul's books include "Herzberuhigungsklagen": Die...