CONTRIBUTORS
Tzvi Abuschis Rose B. and Joseph Cohen Professor of Assyriology and Ancient
Near Eastern Religion at Brandeis University. He received his Ph.D. in Assyriology
from Harvard University. He has taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary of
America and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has held a number of awards
and fellowships. Most recently, he was a member of the Institutes for Advanced Study
in Princeton ( 2003 – 4 ) and in Jerusalem ( 2006 ). His primary fields of research and
publication are Mesopotamian religion, magic, literature and thought, as well as
biblical and Babylonian interconnections. A number of his studies on magic and
mythology are to be found in his Mesopotamian Witchcraft: Towards a History and
Understanding of Babylonian Witchcraft Beliefs and Literature (Leiden: Brill/Styx, 2002 )
and The Epic of Gilgamesh: Male and Female Encounters and Other Issues (Winona Lake,
IN: Eisenbrauns, in press).
Zainab Bahrani is the Edith Porada Associate Professor of Ancient Near Eastern
Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. She is the author of, among
other publications, Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia(London:
Routledge, 2001 ), and The Graven Image: Representation in Babylonia and Assyria
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003 ). Prior to her appointment at
Columbia University, Professor Bahrani taught at the University of Vienna in Austria,
and The State University of New York, at Stony Brook, and was a curator at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Near Eastern Antiquities Department from 1989 – 1992.
Heather D. Baker, after graduating in Archaeology from the University of Cambridge,
participated in numerous excavations in Britain, Cyprus, Jordan, Turkey and especially
in Iraq. At the University of Oxford she gained an M.Phil. in Cuneiform Studies and
a D.Phil. in Assyriology. Since January 2003 she has been working as a Researcher
with the START Project on ‘The Economic History of Babylonia in the 1 st millennium
BC’ at the University of Vienna. Her publications include a monograph, The Archive
of the Nappahu Family( 2004 ), and (as editor) The Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian
Empire, Part 2 /I ( 2000 ), Part 2 /II ( 2001 ), Part 3 /I ( 2002 ), andApproaching the Babylonian
Economy( 2005 , with M. Jursa). Her research interests are in the social and economic
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