Anne Goddeerisis based at the University of Leuven and is a specialist in economic
texts from the Old Babylonian period. Her book Economy and Society in Northern
Babylonia in the Early Old Babylonian Period (ca. 2000–1600 BC) appeared in 2002.
Irene Goodis an archaeologist of Central and Western Asia and the Indo-Iranian
borderlands. She received her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999
and since 2001 has been an Associate of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University.
Her specific research interests concern cloth in all its aspects, from labour, technology
and materials, to social uses, semiotics, iconography and the symbolic uses of cloth
as a major component of material culture. As a Guggenheim Fellow, Dr Good
embarked on a major study entitled A Social Archaeology of Textiles, and is now
completing a book entitled Cloth and Carpet in Early Inner Asia, to be published
through Brill’s Inner Asia series. She has curated important textile collections as
Hardy Visiting Curator at the Peabody Museum, and has developed a novel application
of biochemical techniques to the study of severely degraded archaeological fibres.
Dr Good’s current research is focused on the later Bronze period of Western China,
Afghanistan and the Indo-Iranian borderlands. She is currently directing a new
archaeological survey in southern Tajikistan.
Brigitte Gronebergis Professor for Assyriology at the University of Göttingen,
Germany. Her research interests are Akkadian grammar, Mesopotamian literature
and the Cultural History of the Ancient Near East. Her most recent book Die Götter
des Zweistromlandes; Kulte, Mythen, Epen, (Artemis & Winkler, Düsseldorf/Zurich: 2004 )
provides an overview of religious concepts and cosmology in the Ancient Near East.
Anthony Howellwas born in 1945. By 1995 he was a dancer in the Royal Ballet.
Soon after, he left the ballet to concentrate on writing. In 1973 , he was invited to
join the programme for International Writers at the University of Iowa. Since then
his output has included many collections of poetry, mainly published by Anvil, the
most recent being his Selected Poems and Dancers in Daylight.His versions of Statius
and those of W. G. Shepherd were published by Anvil in 2007.
Blahoslav Hrusˇka studied Assyriology and Archaeology at the Philosophical Faculty
of Charles University, Prague, and Sumerian at Munich. Since 1982 , he has been
studying the theme of traditional Mesopotamian agriculture throughout several
research projects (Berlin: Free University and Max Planck Institute for the History
of Science; Oxford, UK: Sumerian Agriculture Group). He works as a researcher at
the Oriental Institute of the Czechoslovak and the Czech Academy of Sciences, and
he also teaches History, Culture and Religion of the Ancient Near East at the Hussite
Theological Faculty of Charles University, Prague.
Michael Jursa is Associate Professor at the University of Vienna. His main research
interests are Babylonian social and economic history and material culture. Currently
he is director of a project funded by the Fonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen
Forschung (Vienna) which aims at writing a comprehensive economic history of
Babylonia in the first millennium BC.
— Contributors —xvii