Current Research Projects

The Electronic Corpus of Urartian Texts (eCUT) Project, a sub-project of the Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (MOCCI), is the first electronic corpus of Urartian written sources from the kingdom of Urartu and the first corpus that makes the Urartian texts accessible through annotated (lemmatized) transliterations, English translations and an English glossary. more

Gird-i Rostam is a relatively small, but tall multi-period settlement mound in the easternmost part of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, directly on the border with Iran. Despite the extensive archaeological work carried out in the Sulaymaniyah region during the past two decades, the area of Gird-i Rostam remained largely unexplored. Since 2018 NYU and LMU have been joining forces to conduct excavations at the site under the auspices of the Directorate of Antiquities of Sulaymaniyah. more

This project is concerned with legal norms and practices in various societies that existed in Asia Minor and Northern Syria during the 2nd and 1st millennium BC. The focus is on the cuneiform documents of the Hittite Empire and the Lycian epichoric inscriptions. The thematic focus is on legal procedures and the institutional framework used to assert claims and sanction illegal action. more

The Peshdar Plain is situated in the Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq, directly at the Iranian border. Our research sheds light on a hitherto little known frontier region of the Assyrian Empire, specifically the Border March of the Place Herald at the border to the kingdom of Mannea. more

• Preliminary report on the 2015 excavation season at Gird-i Bazar
• Preliminary report on the 2016 excavation season at Gird-i Bazar
• Preliminary report on the 2016 excavation season at Qalat-i Dinka
• Preliminary report on the 2017 excavation season in the Lower Town at Dinka (DLT2)
• Preliminary report on the 2017 excavation season at Gird-i Bazar
• Preliminary report on the 2018 spring excavation season at Qalat-i Dinka
• Preliminary report on the 2018 Dinka Lower Town Campaign (DLT3)
• Preliminary report on the 2019 spring activities at the Dinka Settlement Complex and in the Bora Plain – 19th April – 4th May 2019
• Preliminary report on the 2019 autumn activities at the Dinka Settlement Complex

The long-term excavation project in Tell Sheikh Hamad, begun in 1978 and ended by the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011, is currently being published by Prof. Dr. Janoscha Kreppner (Münster) and Jens Rohde as part of the research portfolio of the Alexander von Humboldt-Professorship in the Ancient History of the Near and Middle East. more

This research project, launched by Stephan J. Seidlmayer and Robert Schiestl under the auspices of the German Archaeological Institute Cairo and in collaboration with the Egyptian Antiquities Authority, investigates the northern part of the western central delta. The low lying northern fringes of the delta have hardly been visited by archaeologists, let alone been scientifically studied. This survey is the first systematic study of this region. more

Cross-cultural studies have already shed light on the multifarious interactions between the Ancient Near East and Greece in the areas of religion, literature and myth. Based on these results the project will examine whether there was also an exchange of political ideas between East and West that had an impact on the emergence of the Athenian Democracy. more

A key objective of the newly established Chair for the Ancient History of the Near and Middle East is the promotion of easily accessible open-access source databases. Our aim is to make many of the rich primary sources of Assyria, Babylonia, and their contemporaries available online for free in a fully searchable and richly annotated (lemmatized) format. more

This project will produce a complete, modern scholarly edition of the corpus of official inscriptions of the last native kings of Babylon (626-539 BCE) in print and in an annotated, open-access digital format. more