Piecing the Puzzle, Shaping the Scholarship: Judeans in the Babylonian Exile

As with a jigsaw puzzle, pieces of textual evidence are identified and arranged in frames and contexts to reconstruct a larger picture of the experience of ancient populations. Just as the challenge of resolving a jigsaw puzzle increases in proportion to the number and size of its component pieces, scholarly reconstruction of history is rendered more complex and nuanced by the variety of sources which record the social, economic, literary, and religious experiences of the people that produced them. This broad, illustrated, survey of cuneiform evidence bearing on the study of the Babylonian Exile considers the variety and contents of sources that shape the emerging narrative of the Judean exiles in Babylonia, their processes of economic and cultural acculturation, and mechanisms for identity maintenance.

Dr. Laurie Pearce is a lecturer in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches Akkadian language courses and Mesopotamian history. In 2014, she published (with Cornelia Wunsch) Documents of  Judean Exiles and West Semites in Babylonia in the Collection of David Sofer (CUSAS 28. Bethesda: CDL Press), a collection of cuneiform administrative texts that record Judean integration into Babylonian society in the early days of the Exile. Her research focuses on the economic and social and history of the late first millennium BCE, especially questions of ethnicity and acculturation. She has been an early adopter of digital tools and methods, including social network analysis and had developed the digital project Hellenistic Babylonia: Texts, Images and Names (HBTIN; build-oracc.museum.upenn.edu/hbtin/corpus), a project in the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (ORACC, oracc.org) consortium for the online publication of cuneiform texts.

About the Ancient Near East Lecture Series: Each year, we bring 2 or more speakers to deliver a seminar with graduate students and a public talk. The idea is to expose our graduate students to cutting edge research in Ancient Near East and Hebrew Bible and to form professional bonds with leading scholars, as well as provide more opportunities for the general public to learn about the Ancient Near East.

Dial-In Information

https://utexas.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0sduChrDwsH9Cm2vV_PnSc7CM7mP3Pt_Mv

Wednesday, October 7, 2020 at 5:00pm to 6:00pm

Virtual Event
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Academics, Arts & Humanities, World & Culture

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All Departments

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Students, Staff, Faculty, Alumni, General Public

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https://utexas.zoom.us/meeting/regist...

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