By Persia & Babylonia
Disambiguation of individuals in Late-Babylonian letters
Yuval Levavi (Bar-Ilan University)
5 July 2018, 12-13 hrs
Lipsius 204
Leiden University
Neo-Babylonian scribes were mostly satisfied with using first name base in their letters. That, in addition to the practice not to date proper letters, make the task of prosopography especially complicated. It is like joining late to an ongoing conversation, asking: whom, and what are we talking about? But unlike the polite answer of, say, legal text, letters simply mumble, “you just had to be there”. We will explore ways to overcome these obstacles and discuss the validity of first name based identifications.
