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Seth Richardson

Assistant Professor of Ancient Near Eastern History

Seth Richardson is interested in rewriting the history of antiquity around its divisions and multiplicities. He works on state collapse, with an historical focus on the Late Old Babylonian period: on texts, archives, and prosopography, but also on theoretical approaches informed by political science and comparative literature. His related work on rebellion in the Ancient Near East looks at such factors as non-state actors, disenchantment from state ideologies, and borderlands identities. Mesopotamian conceptions of political geography form another facet of his work, including state efforts control open space and rural social orders. His current projects include work on ancient labor, theory-of-value, and scope-of- the-economy; the development of Old Babylonian divinatory literature; a “new military history” of Mesopotamia; an historiographic appraisal of the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem in 701 B.C. He has been Assistant Professor of Ancient Near Eastern History at the University of Chicago since 2003.

Courses taught

Survey of Mesoptamian History, Historiography for ANE Research, Decline and Collapse in the ANE, Problems in Ancient Greek and Near Eastern History, Seminar on Old Babylonian History, Research Methods for ANE History, War and Society in Ancient Iraq, Uses of Ancient Middle Eastern Pasts, Social History of the Ancient Near East, Babylonian Knowledge, and Ancient Empires: Neo-Assyria.

Publications

Books in progress

Prelude to Darkness. An historical study of the collapse of the First Dynasty of Babylon.

Texts of the Late Old Babylonian Period. Copies and analyses of legal and administrative texts.

Rebellions and Peripheries in the Cuneiform World. Edited-volume on the relationship between political dissent and the peripheries of the state. In press as American Oriental Series 91.

Projects

Prosopography of the Late Old Babylonian Period

Select articles

“On Seeing and Believing: Liver Divination, Observationalism, and the Era of Warring States,” in press for OIS 6 (in press), ed. A. Annus.

“The Fields of Rebellion and Periphery,” and “Writing Rebellion back into the Record: Research Opportunities,” Introduction and Chapter One to Rebellions and Peripheries ed. S. Richardson (in press).

“The World of the Babylonian Countrysides,” in The Babylonian World, ed. Gwendolyn Leick, London: Routledge, 2007.

“Death and Dismemberment in Mesopotamia: Discorporation between the Body and the Body Politic,” in Performing Death (OIS 3), ed. N. Laneri, Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2007.

“gir3-gen-na and Shulgi’s ‘Library’: Liver Omen Texts in the Third Millennium BC (I).” Cuneiform Digital Library Journal 2006:3

“Trouble in the Countryside, ana tarsi Samsuditana: Militarism, Kassites, and the Fall of Babylon I,” in Ethnicity in Mesopotamia [CRRAI 48]. Leiden: PIHANS, 2005.

“Ewe Should Be So Lucky: Extispicy Reports and Everyday Life,” in Mining the Archives: Festschrift for Christopher Walker on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday, ed. C. Wunsch. Dresden: ISLET, 2002.

“An Assyrian Garden of Ancestors: Room I, Northwest Palace, Kalhu.” State Archives of Assyria Bulletin XIII, 2001.

“Libya Domestica: Libyan Trade and Society on the Eve of the Invasions of Egypt.” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt XXXVI, 2001.