Back to House F: Personal Reflections on 25 Years of Research (on Zoom)

Back to House F: Personal Reflections on 25 Years of Research on Old Babylonian Schooling

I spent the late summer of 1998 in the basement of the (then) Oriental Institute Museum, poring over the little scraps of clay that now feature in ISAC’s wonderful exhibition, Back to School in Babylonia. At that time, there were just a few of us interested in the minutiae of learning how to be cuneiform literate in the ancient Middle East. But to me it seemed, and still seems, a fundamental starting point for understanding the whys and hows of the historical record excavated from the ruin mounds of Iraq and its neighbors.

In this talk I will trace how our collective understanding of cuneiform literacy has developed over the past quarter-century; reflect on how my encounter with House F shaped my own thinking and practice; and suggest some potential directions for future research.

Eleanor Robson is Professor of Ancient Middle Eastern History at University College London, Co-steerer of Oracc.org, the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, and Director of the Iraq-based Nahrein Network. Her most recent publication is an edition of the archive of cuneiform tablets from the Sealand site of Tell Khaiber in southern Iraq. She is currently collaborating with Dr Laith Hussein, Director of the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, on an archaeologically contextualised study of the Old Babylonian mathematical tablets from Tell Harmal, ancient Shaduppum, in Baghdad.

This talk will be live on Zoom only.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures Museum, 1155 East 58th Street, Chicago, United States