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Writings Out of Time Fall Lecture Series

All lectures located in Special Collections, unless otherwise noted.

Lecture I – October 1, Thursday, 3:00 p.m.

Ancient Near Eastern Literacy and Libraries: Their Significance for the Scholarly Tradition of the ‘West’
Anne Kilmer, in conjunction with the Archaeological Institute of America, Tucson Chapter

Lecture II – October 19, Monday, 3:00 p.m.

Speaker Panel:
From Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Arizona: The First Writing, Indiana Jones and the Arizona State Museum Basement’s Mystery
Ewa Wasilewska, Associate Professor/Lecturer, Department of Anthropology and the Middle East Center, University of Utah

The Origins of the Alphabet: From Proto-Sinaitic to Greek
Ronald S. Hendel, The Norma and Sam Dabby Professor of Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Egyptian Hieroglyphs: Writing with Pictures and Painting with Words
Richard H. Wilkinson, Regents’ Professor of Egyptian Archaeology, School of Anthropology, Department of Classics and Department of Near Eastern Studies, The University of Arizona

Lecture III – October 29, Thursday, 4:00 p.m.

Archaeological Preservation Efforts and Agonies in Northern Iraq, 2006
Jesse Ballenger, Ph.D. Candidate and Haury Fellow, Department of Anthropology, The University of Arizona, in conjunction with the Archaeological Institute of America, Tucson Chapter.

Lecture IV – November 5, Thursday, 4:00 p.m.

Life and Death on the Estate of a Princess in 21st Century BCE Mesopotamia
David Owen, The Bernard and Jane Schapiro Professor of Ancient Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and Curator of Tablet Collections, The Jonathan and Jeannette Rosen Ancient Near Eastern Studies Seminar, Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, in conjunction with the Archaeological Institute of America, Tucson Chapter.

Lecture V – November 9, Monday, 7:00 p.m.

Lecture location: Tucson Jewish Community Center, 3800 E River Rd.
The Art of Writing in Ancient Israel
William Schniedewind, Professor of Biblical Studies and Kershaw Chair of Ancient Eastern Mediterranean Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. Lecture presented as part of the Arizona Center for Judaic Studies Shaol Pozez Memorial Lectureship Series.

SERIES SPEAKERS

Jesse Ballenger, Ph.D. candidate and Haury Fellow, epartment of Anthropology, The University of Arizona. In 2005, when Mr. Ballenger was part way into his doctoral studies, he traveled to Iraq as part of the Arizona Army National Guard and served there for one year. He began as a soldier but his role evolved into that of a military archaeologist in Hatra.

Ronald S. Hendel, The Norma and Sam Dabby Professor of Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies, University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Hendel holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University (1985). He is the author of three books, Remembering Abraham: Culture, Memory, and History in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford University Press, 2005), The Text of Genesis 1–11: Textual Studies and Critical Edition (Oxford University Press, 1998), and The Epic of the Patriarch: The Jacob Cycle and the Narrative Traditions of Canaan and Israel (Scholars Press, 1987), and of numerous scholarly and popular articles. He is a frequent contributor to Biblical Archaeology Review and Bible Review. Dr. Hendel is editor-in-chief of a new critical edition of the Hebrew Bible (The Oxford Hebrew Bible) and is writing a new commentary on the book of Genesis for the Anchor Bible series. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in biblical literature, religion and history, Northwest Semitic philology, and comparative mythology.

Anne D. Kilmer, Emeritus Professor of Assyriology, Department of Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology, University of California at Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania (1959). Dr. Kilmer is the author of numerous books and articles, and a contributing author and editor on numerous Assyriological projects. Her works include Two New Lists of Key Numbers for Mathematical Operations (1960), The Fauna of Ancient Mesopotamia (with B. Landsberger and E. I. Gordon, 1960), The Mesopotamian Concept of Overpopulation and its Solution as Reflected in the Mythology (1972), The Cult Song with Music from Ancient Ugarit: Another Interpretation (1974), Sounds from Silence: Recent Discoveries in Ancient Near Eastern Music (with R. L. Crocker and R. R. Brown, record with book, 1976), "Sumerian and Akkadian Names for Designs and Geometric Shapes" in Investigating Artistic Environments in the Ancient Near East (1990),"An Oration on Babylon” (1991), "A Note on Overlooked Word-Play in the Akkadian Gilgamesh" in Studies in Homosexuality: A 13 Volume Anthology of Scholarly Articles (1993), and "Fugal Features of Atrahasis: The Birth Theme" in Mesopotamian Poetic Language: Sumerian and Akkadian Proceedings of the Groningen Group for the Study of Mesopotamian Literature (1996). Dr. Kilmer taught courses in Akkadian and Hurrian, and in ancient Near Eastern history, literature and music.

David Owen, The Bernard and Jane Schapiro Professor of Ancient Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, and Curator of Tablet Collections, The Jonathan and Jeannette Rosen Ancient Near Eastern Studies Seminar, Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University (1969). In addition to extensive archaeological fieldwork in Italy, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, and Israel, Dr. Owen has published widely in cuneiform studies, with over 100 articles and reviews and four volumes of cuneiform texts, the most recent of which is Neo-Sumerian Texts from American Collections (Unione Accademica Nazionale - Multigrafica Editrice, 1991), and The Garshana Archives (with Rudolph H. Mayer, CDL Press, 2007). He is the founding editor of the series Studies on the Civilization and Culture of Nuzi and the Hurrians (Eisenbrauns and CDL Press) that began in 1981 and is in its eighteenth volume (2009), co-edited with Prof. G. Wilhelm (Bayerische Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg). He is also the founding editor-in-chief of Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology (2007 ff.), a multi-volume publication of cuneiform texts and studies in the Cornell University collections and elsewhere. Dr. Owen teaches courses in Ancient Near Eastern history and archaeology, Assyriology, Biblical history and archaeology, and maritime history and archaeology.

William M. Schniedewind, the Kershaw Chair of Ancient Mediterranean Studies, and Professor of Biblical Studies and Northwest Semitic Languages at the University of California, Los Angeles, received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University (1992). His research specialization is in Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles and has written several critically acclaimed books, The Word of God in Transition (Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), Society and the Promise to David (Oxford, 1999), and How the Bible Became a Book (Cambridge, 2004). Dr. Schniedewind teaches courses on Jewish history in the First and Second Temple periods, the Hebrew Bible and the Apocrypha, Ugarit, Northwest Semitic Inscriptions, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. He is the network editor for Dead Sea Scrolls and Second Temple Judaism, for Religious Studies Review and serves on the steering committee for the Hebrew Bible, History and Archaeology section for the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature.

Ewa Wasilewska, Associate Professor/Lecturer, Department of Anthropology and the Middle East Center, University of Utah. She was born in Gdansk, Poland and holds two M.A.s (archeology and history of the Middle East and Europe; Middle Eastern Studies) and a Ph.D. (anthropology). Dr. Wasilewska has conducted archaeological and anthropological fieldwork and traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, Malta and China as a consultant, cultural and applied anthropologist, and photojournalist. She is engaged in a major project searching, "rediscovering" and facilitating the publication of thousands of cuneiform tablets (including the Arizona State Museum collection) brought to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century by Professor Edgar J. Banks, and is currently finishing a book on his life as an archaeologist, antiquities dealer, explorer and movie director. Dr. Wasilewska teaches courses on the ancient and modern Middle East and Central Asia, and lectures nationally and internationally. She has published extensively in both professional and general interest journals and is the author of In Search of the Past: The Hittites of Anatolia (with M. Grimsdale, 1994) and Creation Stories of the Middle East (Jessica Kingsley Publisher, 2001).

Richard H. Wilkinson, Regents' Professor of Egyptian Archaeology, School of Anthropology, Department of Classics and Department of Near Eastern Studies at The University of Arizona. He received his Ph.D. from University of Minnesota (1986). Dr. Wilkinson is Director of the University of Arizona Egyptian Expedition. He has conducted excavations and research in Egypt for more than 20 years, mainly in the Valley of the Kings, and is currently excavating the memorial temple of Queen Tausert – a little known monarch of the 19th Dynasty who was one of the few Egyptian queens who ruled Egypt as a king. Dr. Wilkinson is the editor of the Directory of North American Egyptologists and of the Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections, which focuses on ancient Egyptian interaction with surrounding cultures. He is the author of many scholarly articles and eight books on Egyptology, most recently Egyptology Today (Cambridge University Press, 2008). His books have been translated into many languages and have received a number of awards. He teaches courses on the history, art and architecture of ancient Egypt, and on Egyptian language, including hieroglyphs.

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