Frans van Koppenis a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Leiden. His main
interest is the second millennium BC.
Amélie Kuhrtis Professor for Ancient Near Eastern History at University College
London, and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her research areas are: Mesopotamia
in the first millennium BC; the Achaemenid Empire; Seleucid rule in Mesopotamia
and Iran. She is the author of The Ancient Near East, c. 3000 – 330 BC ( 2 vols; London:
Routledge, 1995 ) and of the forthcoming volume The Achaemenid Persian Empire: a
corpus of sources(London: Routledge, 2007 ).
Gwendolyn Leick is Senior Lecturer at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London.
Her last books were The Babylonians. An Introduction(Routledge, 2003 ) and Historical
Dictionary of Mesopotamia (Scarecrow Press, 2003 ).
Baruch A. Levineis Skirball Professor Emeritus of Bible and Ancient Near East
Studies, New York University. He is the author of commentaries on Leviticus and
Numbers, and his main research interests are religion and institutions of biblical
Israel. He is a student of the West-Semitic languages with publications on epigraphy
and recently published Assyrian Ideology and Israelite Monotheism( 2005 ).
Stefan M. Maulis Professor of Assyriology at the University of Heidelberg and is a
recipient of the Leibniz prize. He specializes in the study of Babylonian incantations
and divination literature. His translation of the Gilgamesh epic into German was
published in 2005.
Lucia Moriteaches History of the Ancient Near East at the University of Tuscia,
Viterbo, Italy. She is involved in a long-term historical project aiming to reconstruct
the rural landscape in the ancient Near East, which has been promoted and directed
by Mario Liverani since the 1970 s. In this broad project, her main interest has been
the study of the Middle Euphrates valley, and in 2003 she published a volume,
Reconstructing the Emar Landscape, for the series ‘Quaderni di Geografia storica’ published
by the Università ‘La Sapienza’, Rome. Since 1987 she has been working in Fezzan,
Libyan desert, in an archaeological investigation carried out by the Università ‘La
Sapienza’ aimed at the study of the Saharan caravan trade routes in proto-historical
times. A first volume, Aghram Nadharif, the Barkat Oasis in Garamantian Times, was
published in 2006 , edited by Mario Liverani. A second volume on the archaeological
investigation in the oasis of Fewet is in preparation. In addition, she is a member of
the archaeological mission of Yale University in Tell Leilan, Syria, directed by Harvey
Weiss, and she collaborates in the study of the Akkadian occupation of the site, which
has been investigated during the past decade.
Takayoshi Oshimawas born in Japan in 1967 and studied at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem. He now teaches Jewish Studies at the University of Bucharest. His
research interests include the study of Mesopotamian religion and his Ph.D. dissertation
was entitled Hymns and Prayers to Marduk and his Divine Elements in the Texts. A book,
Cuneiform in Canaan: Cuneiform Sources from the Land of Isarel in Ancient Times, with
Wayne Horowitz, is in press.
— Contributors —xviii