Eleanor Robson’s work focuses on questions of numeracy and literacy in ancient
Iraq. Her publications include Mesopotamian Mathematics, 2100 – 1600 BC(Oxford,
1999 ) and, with Jeremy Black, Graham Cunningham and Gábor Zólyomi, The Literature
of Ancient Sumer(Oxford, 2004 ). She is a university lecturer in the Department of
History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of All
Souls College, Oxford.
Walther Sallaberger is Professor of Assyriology at the University of Munich. His
research interests include: Mesopotamian history, society, culture and religion, based
on Sumerian and Akkadian texts; Sumerian administrative texts; Sumerian lexicog-
raphy; text linguistics. He is the author of Sumerer und Akkader – Geschichte – Gesellschaft
- Kultur(C.H. Beck Verlag, Munich 2005 ) and the forthcoming ( 2006 ) Glossary of
Neo-Sumerian Royal inscriptions.
Gebhard J. Selzis Chair of Ancient Oriental Languages and Oriental Archaeology
at the University of Vienna. He is the editor of several academic journals, such as
Archiv für Orientforschung,Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes,andWiener
Offene Orientalistik. His research centres on religions and economics of third millennium
BCMesopotamia, early classification systems and early empiricism.
Laura D. Steeleis completing her doctoral dissertation on Mesopotamian slave
women in the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology
at the University of California, Berkeley. Her other research interests include Anatolian
archaeology, digital-assisted analyses of ancient architecture, and connections between
Greece and the Near East; she also has worked with excavation teams at Çatal Höyük
(Turkey) and at Tel Dor (Israel). Among her most recent publications are papers on
Herodotus and Urartu in the American Journal of Ancient History 3 / 1 ( 2004 ) and on
Parmenides and Shamash in the Classical Quarterly 52 / 1 ( 2002 ).
Jon Taylor is curator of the cuneiform collections in the Department of the Ancient
Near East at the British Museum. London. His research interests include literacy and
education in the ancient world.
P. S. Vermaakis Associate Professor in Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University
of South Africa. Trained initially as a theologian he specialized in the Semitic Languages
and currently teaches Ancient Near Eastern Culture, Classical Hebrew, Ugaritic,
Sumerian, Akkadian and Egyptian. He gained his Ph.D. in 1989 on the temple offi-
cials in the Ur III period. The focus of his current research is the cultural background
of the Ancient Near East with special reference to the cultural exchange in the Ancient
Near East during the second millennium BC.
David A. Warburton(D.Phil. University of Berne, Switzerland) teaches Near Eastern
Archaeology and Egyptology at universities in Denmark, Switzerland and France.
A former director of the American Institute for Yemeni Studies in Sana’a, he has
participated in archaeological field work in France, Switzerland, Egypt, Syria, Iraq
and Yemen. His research interests centre on economics and politics in the ancient
world, but also include religion, architecture, colour terminology, chronology and
— Contributors —xx