Keynote Speakers

Manuel Molina

Manuel Molina obtained his degree in Geography and History from the Complutense University of Madrid and completed his studies in Assyriology and his doctoral thesis at La Sapienza University of Rome, under the supervision of Giovanni Pettinato. Between 1989 and 1995, he was Associate Professor at the University of Murcia. He is currently a Research Professor at the Institute of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid, where he has been working since 1995.

His research has focused on Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium BCE, particularly on the cuneiform archives of the Third Dynasty of Ur. He has worked extensively and published on various topics, especially those related to administration and bureaucracy, law and legal practice, and material culture. He is also the author of several editions of Sumerian cuneiform texts preserved in the Abbey of Montserrat, the Royal Academy of History of Spain, the British Museum, and other museums and private collections. He has also worked intensively on the identification, location, and documentation of Sumerian cuneiform tablets illegally excavated in Iraq after the First and Second Gulf Wars. Furthermore, he is the editor of the Database of Neo-Sumerian Texts (http://bdtns.filol.csic.es), a reference corpus that provides open access to over one hundred thousand Sumerian cuneiform tablets.

Keynote lecture: Housing, Personal Wealth, and the Ur III State

Abstract: Recent archaeological research has made significant strides in examining wealth and inequality across the Ancient Near East from a diachronic perspective. However, the final centuries of the third millennium BCE have often been overlooked in these studies due to the lack of sufficiently consistent datasets. This paper addresses that gap by analyzing some quantitative data derived from textual sources to explore the factors influencing individual wealth and housing during this period. These factors include access to subsistence land, time allocated to state-imposed duties, required payments under specific circumstances, the intensity of state pressure to fulfill labor and material obligations, and the degree of state control over individuals’ lives and property. Together, these elements played a critical role in shaping everyday life and well-being.

Marc Van De Mieroop

Marc Van De Mieroop is Miriam Champion Professor of History at Columbia University, New York, and the Founding Editor of the Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History. He has published numerous books and articles on various aspects of ancient Near Eastern history, Egyptian history, and World History with interests ranging from socio-economic and political history to intellectual history. He has also written extensively on historical methodology as it applies to his field of study. The fourth edition of his A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000 - 323 B.C. appeared in late 2024. His most recent books, Philosophy before the Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia (Princeton University Press, 2015) and Before and After Babel: Writing as resistance in ancient Near Eastern Empires (Oxford University Press, 2023), investigate the underlying principles of Babylonian hermeneutics and their relationship to the various writing systems of the ancient Near Eastern world. He has received various fellowships including from the Guggenheim Foundation, the ACLS, the NEH, and the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna.

Keynote lecture: From Dawn to Dusk: The Tyranny of Time in the Babylonians’ Daily Life

Abstract: While today we are all harassed by devices that encourage us to use time efficiently, it may seem that living without watches or clocks the ancient Babylonians were spared these hassles. But time-keeping was part of the earliest accounting system and in their detail developed to what may seem levels of absurdity. This paper will discuss how time was measured and what its effects were on people’s daily lives. It will also elaborate how time was inherently tied to labor organization and how changes in one led to changes in the other in early second millennium Babylonia.

Shana Zaia

Shana Zaia is Assistant Professor of Ancient History at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where she teaches in the History and International Studies program as well as the joint VU-UvA Amsterdam Center for Ancient Studies and Archaeology. Before starting in Amsterdam in 2023, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow and later Universitätsassistentin at the University of Vienna. She has also been an Apollo Fellow at the University of Sydney and has worked at the University of Helsinki, Fairfield University, and Yale University, where she earned her PhD in Assyriology from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Shana’s research focus is the 1st millennium BCE, particularly the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and her publications address topics such as royal ideology, religion, kingship, and the roles of cultic personnel and officials.

Keynote lecture: Growing Up Imperial: Raising the Next Generation of Empire in 1st Millennium BCE Mesopotamia

Abstract: Analyses of the forms and functions of the empires in Mesopotamia during the 1st millennium BCE typically focus on the operational roles of their kings, officials, and bureaucrats. Yet the success or failure of the imperial mission did not rely solely on top-down governance, but to a great extent on the empire’s ability to instill and perpetuate its norms and ideologies, particularly among its power-holding elites. These elites, largely comprising urban men serving the state as officials and administrators but also including royal family members, were socialized from their earliest years into the empire’s customs, cultural expectations, and socio-political hierarchies. Moreover, for the empire to achieve long term success, it was essential to transmit these imperial structures and values intergenerationally, so that the next cohort of powerbrokers were raised as active stakeholders in the imperial mission. This lecture explores some of these processes of upbringing and socialization, asking how people were raised within the expectations and worldviews of empire and to what effect.