Elisabetta Cianfanelli earned her Ph.D. in Historical Studies in 2019 from the Università degli Studi di Firenze with a dissertation in Assyriology focused on the study of several Ebla officials frequently documented in the 3rd millennium cuneiform Palace G Archives excavated at Tell Mardikh, Syria.
Since 2019, she has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the same university and recently joined the editorial team of Asia Anteriore Antica: Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures Studies as a member of the editorial secretariat.
As a Postdoctoral Fellow, she holds the position of Teaching Assistant Professor, where she supports courses in Assyriology and Ancient Near Eastern History for both BA and MA students. Additionally, she leads seminars for Ph.D. students focusing on the 2nd millennium Mari archives and the 3rd millennium Ebla archives. She has enriched her expertise in Akkadian and Sumerian through attending specialized courses at the Pontificio Istituto Biblico, where her studies centered on Old Babylonian letters and ritual texts, Old Assyrian letters, and Sumerian royal inscriptions and Ur III legal texts. This has equipped her to lead workshops for MA and Ph.D. students on Sumerian Grammar, in addition to workshops on Cuneiform Epigraphy, where she guides students in creating digital hand-copies of cuneiform tablets.
She has been an active member of the Research Unit of the Università degli Studi di Firenze, participating in the national PRIN 2017 project “Big Data and Early Archives (Big-DEA). Measuring Settlement Dynamics and Environmental Exploitation in the Ebla Region during the 3rd Millennium BC: Archaeological Record, Cuneiform Texts, and Remote Sensing”; as a member of the Research Unit of the Università degli Studi di Firenze, she is currently participating in the national PRIN 2022 project “The Environmental, Economic and Social Geography of Ebla in the 3rd millennium BC: A Connected World”.
Her primary research field remains Ebla, on which she has published various papers, mainly focused on reconstructing the social structure of Ebla, but also including investigations into Ebla legal texts, as well as topographical and chronological studies. Prosopography is her primary research methodology, and she has been contributing to the online project The Prosopography of Ebla (ProsE) of the Università degli Studi di Firenze since 2019.
As a Visiting Research Fellow at the NINO Institute, Elisabetta Cianfanelli aims to publish a monograph on Ebla management of its territory, thereby expanding on the themes explored in her doctoral thesis with a broader geographical and comparative scope. Her project will mainly focus on the ugula-officials, who were responsible for overseeing nearly all productive activities across various centers in the Ebla kingdom. The research will examine both the economic and productive roles of these centers and promoting a comparison with the administrative records from earlier or almost contemporary tablet collections found at other sites in Syria.
For her publications see Academia and ORCID.