Dominique Collonhas recently retired from the British Museum where she was a
curator in the Department of the Ancient Near East with particular responsibility
for Seals, Anatolia and Mesopotamia. Her numerous publications include three volumes
of the catalogue of the Museum’s seals (she is working on a fourth), First Impressions
- Cylinder Seals in the Ancient Near East(London, 1987 ; new edition 2005 ), and Ancient
Near Eastern Art(London, 1995 ) based on the Museum’s collections. She has travelled
extensively throughout the Near East, led many tours and excavated in Iraq, Syria
and Turkey.
Harriet Crawfordspecializes in the later prehistory of Mesopotamia and is an honorary
Visiting Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. She
is also a Research Fellow at the McDonald Institute Cambridge and the author of
Sumer and the Sumerians(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004 ), as well as
a number of books on the archaeology of the Arabo/Persian Gulf.
Frederick Mario Fales is Full Professor of Ancient Near Eastern History at the
University of Udine (Italy). His main scholarly interests concern the Neo-Assyrian
period, and range from historical studies to the edition of Assyrian and Aramaic texts
of this age. He is on the editorial board of two international projects on Neo-Assyrian
texts, State Archives of Assyria(Helsinki), and Studien zu den Assur-Texten (Berlin), to
which he has also contributed three co-authored monographs. He has founded an
international journal on Neo-Assyrian studies, the State Archives of Assyria Bulletin
(Padua), which has now reached its thirteenth annual volume. His most recent book,
Saccheggio in Mesopotamia(Udine [Forum], 2004 ) is an analysis of the 2003 pillage of
the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, framed within a history of the museum and of its rich
archaeological heritage, from Gertrude Bell to Saddam Hussein.
Hannes D. Galteris Universitätsdozent for Assyriology at the University of Graz.
He teaches Assyriology and Ancient Near Eastern History at the University of Graz
and is co-editor of the ‘Grazer Morgenländische Studien’. He published several books
on Ancient Near Eastern topics such as Der mesopotamische Gott Enki/Ea( 1983 ), Die
Rolle der Astronomie in den Kulturen Mesopotamiens( 1993 ) and Kopftuch und Schleier( 2001 ).
His main interests and working areas are Mesopotamian history, historiography and
literature and especially Assyrian royal inscriptions.
M. J. Geller is Professor of Semitic Languages at UCL, in the Department of Hebrew
and Jewish Studies. He spent the 2005 – 2006 academic year in Paris as Visiting
Professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, with a grant from the Wellcome
Trust. He has published ‘Renal and rectal disease’, Babylonisch-Assyrische Medizin,
Vol. 7 ( 2005 ).
A. R. George is Professor of Babylonian at the School of Oriental and African Studies,
the University of London. His chief research focus is on Babylonian civilization,
especially literature, religion, mythology and intellectual achievement and his most
recent book is The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform
Texts(OUP, 2003 ). His new translation of Gilgamesh for Penguin Classics won the
2000 Kuwait-British Fellowship Society prize for Middle Eastern Studies.
— Contributors —xvi