D. T. Pottswas educated at Harvard and the Free University of Berlin and is Edwin
Cuthbert Hall Professor of Middle Eastern Archaeology at the University of Sydney.
He has conducted fieldwork in Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates,
and is editor-in-chief of the journal Arabian Archaeology & Epigraphy. He is the author
of numerous books and articles on the archaeology of Iran, Mesopotamia, the Persian
Gulf and the Arabian peninsula, including Mesopotamian Civilization: the material
foundations( 1997 ), The Archaeology of Elam( 1999 ), Ancient Magan( 2000 ) and Excavations
at Tepe Yahya 1967 – 1975 : the third millennium( 2001 ).
Johannes Rengeris Professor Emeritus of Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Freie
Universität Berlin. He studied Theology (i.a. Old Testament Studies), Assyriology,
Egyptology and Semitic Languages at the Universities of Leipzig and Heidelberg
(gaining his Ph.D. in Assyriology from the University of Heidelberg 1965 ). He was
a research associate and taught at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago. From
1976 to 2002 he was Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Freie Universität
Berlin. Special interests are economic and social history of the Ancient Near East
Mesopotamia, comparative economic history, history of Assyriology, and literary
criticism.
Frances Reynoldsis a Shillito Fellow in Assyriology and Senior Research Fellow of
St Benet’s Hall at the University of Oxford. She is also a Sessional Lecturer at Birkbeck
College, University of London, and an Honorary Research Fellow of the University
of Birmingham. From September 2007 , she will be contributing to a project on
cuneiform libraries at the University of Cambridge. Dr Reynolds’ research interests
include Mesopotamian intellectual life and religion, and she is working on her
forthcoming book, Scholars and Invaders: Babylon under Threat in Astrology, Ritual, Myth
and Prophecy. Other forthcoming publications include ‘A divine body: new joins in
the Sippar Collection’, in Your Praise is Sweet: A Memorial Volume Presented to Jeremy
Allen Black by Colleagues, Students, and Friends(eds H.D. Baker, E. Robson and G.
Zólyomi, Oxford: Griffith Institute, in press). Her first book was published in 2003 :
The Babylonian Correspondence of Esarhaddon and Letters to Assurbanipal and Sin-sˇarru-
isˇkun from Northern and Central Babylonia: State Archives of Assyria Volune XVIII (Helsinki
University Press).
Seth Richardsonhas been Assistant Professor of Ancient Near Eastern History at
the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute since 2003. He received his Ph.D. from
Columbia University in 2002 , writing his dissertation on the collapse of the First
Dynasty of Babylon. He is now conducting research work on Old Babylonian economic
and administrative texts, Assyrian political history, an intellectual history of early
Babylonian liver divination, and problems in Ancient Near East labour history, state
collapse and chronology.
Dafydd Roberts studied social sciences and philosophy. As a freelance translator
from French and German, he has translated a number of scholarly works in these
fields. Interested, too, in art and cultural history, he has also worked for the Louvre,
the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Tate Gallery, the Pergamon Museum and a number
of other such institutions.
— Contributors —xix