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How to be an Assyriologist? : Inaugural Lecture delivered on Thursday 2


Author: Dominique Charpin
Source: Directory of Open Access Books
Publisher: Collège de France
ISBN: 9782722604575

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Description
Unlike works inherited from Greek or Roman Antiquity, writings from Mesopotamian civilization all come from excavations. Assyriologists work with clay tablets engraved with cuneiform characters. They piece together fragments of texts and organize them chronologically and geographically to gradually construct not only a political but also a social, economic and cultural history of Mesopotamia. The task is immense, and requires a multidisciplinary approach combining archaeology, epigraphy, philology, and history.