Eleanor Robson
Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Taffeh Hall
The recently excavated Iraqi marshland site of Tell Khaiber has yielded nearly 150 cuneiform tablets of the Sealand period (ca. 1730-1460 BCE), all documented in situ. By contrast, the northern Babylonian city of Kish, dug on a large scale in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has produced many thousands of decontextualised tablets that have rarely been studied systematically. In this talk I will draw on my recently completed editorial work for the Ur Regional Archaeology Project, and a collaboration just beginning for the Nahrein Network, to ask: What can those two very different assemblages of historical evidence tell us about how written knowledge was transmitted and accessed in antiquity, and the practices and ethics of Assyriological publication and communication today?
Eleanor Robson is Professor of Ancient Middle Eastern History at University College London.
Photograph of Kish by Ammar Altaee.
The Veenhof Lecture 2022 will be held as a hybrid event. Please join us!
The Veenhof Lecture is organized every November by the Netherlands Institute for the Near East in cooperation with the National Museum of Antiquities. Named after Prof. K.R. Veenhof and honouring his contributions to Assyriology, the annual lecture is aimed at colleagues and students, as well as a broader public. The speaker is an internationally renowned scholar. All are welcome to attend the lecture.
De Veenhof-lezing werd in mei 2002 in het leven geroepen, naar aanleiding van het afscheid van professor Klaas Veenhof als hoogleraar talen en geschiedenis van Babylonië en Assyrië aan de Universiteit Leiden. De lezing wordt jaarlijks georganiseerd door het NINO i.s.m. het Rijksmuseum van Oudheden. Alle geïnteresseerden zijn van harte uitgenodigd.
Spreker: Eleanor Robson, hoogleraar Geschiedenis van het Oude Nabije Oosten aan University College London.