Research

Teilprojekt B01 des SFB 1369 Vigilanzkulturen more

In April 2022, the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage granted permission to a Leibniz Award-funded research project with the title “Excavations and Geophysical Exploration in Assur as well as Restoration of the Andrae House”, jointly headed by Karen Radner and Prof. Dr F. Janoscha Kreppner (WWU Münster). more

This new publication project aims to provide editions, with English translations, of the complete corpus of Akkadian and Sumerian inscriptions of the Kassite period and the Akkadian-language kudurrus that were written during that same period of time. more

This project will produce a complete, modern scholarly edition of the corpus of Akkadian inscriptions of Assyria’s rulers from the late third millennium BC to the reign of Aššur-narari V (754–745 BC). more

Project directed by Prof. Dr. Martin Zimmermann as part of the SPP "Hellenistic Polis". The project's aim is to study the rural settlement structure around Pergamon in the Hellenistic period. To do so, settlement patterns and interrelations are to be reconstructed and their historical development assessed. Particular interest is due to the relationship between the central city and its neighbours. more

The colour terms of the Graeco-Roman world are not only culturally specific, but also embedded into symbolic systems and semantic contexts that cannot be simply transposed into modern categories of world organisation. The habilitation project aims to study ancient classifications of colour and their roots in order to gain an appreciation of their cultural specificity. more

The Department of Ancient History at the LMU plays a leading role in the Priority Programme "The Hellenistic Polis as a Living Space", funded by the DFG. more

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

The option of going into exile "voluntarily" was a significant element of the Roman Republican political system. In the Imperial period, on the other hand, this phenomenon is virtually unknown and exile comes to be seen as a severe punishment. Christian Reitzenstein-Ronning's habilitation project seeks to understand how and why this transformation occurred. 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

Studying historical processes of acculturation presupposes clearly delimited cultural groups. The region of Lycia in Asia Minor offers good preconditions for an analysis of ancient processes of acculturation since the epichoric Lycian culture can be reconstructed relatively well. In the study of these processes, harbour towns play particularly important role. more

A dedicated historical study of Hermupolis Magna would fill a substantial gap in the study of Graeco-Roman Egypt, but also in the study of the ancient city in general. The habilitation project conducted by Dr. Alexander Free aims to produce such a history of the city that incorporates all the new source material. more

The history of Late Antiquity is a long-standing research interest of Prof. Dr. Jens-Uwe Krause. It is pursued here with a particular focus on social history, especially on the history of the family, of Christianity, and of violence and crime.
Photo: Nino Barbieri 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

This three-year project, which is funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation as part of its Lost Cities programme, draws on royal inscriptions of the Neo-Babylonian Empire (626-539 BC), Babylonian Topographical Texts, temple lists, and later local sources to explore the fate of Babylon from the grandeur of the 6th century BC metropolis down to Parthian times and the visit of Trajan, charting the gradual abandonment of parts of the city and analysing the experience of the people inhabiting the city. more

The research network "Norm and Narration in Ancient Societies" organises researchers from a broad range of disciplines from the field of Ancient Studies, including Oriental Philology, Egyptology, Coptology, Ancient History, Classical Philology, Bible Studies, Patrology, as well as Jewish and Islam Studies. The network's central concern is with issues of norm establishment, tradition and criticism in and by narrative texts. 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

A synthetic overview on the Roman family that reflects the current state of research and also includes Late Antiquity is a major desideratum and currently in progress. 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

Published by Oxford University Press and envisioned as the successor of the much loved but now sadly out of date Cambridge Ancient History series, the Oxford History of the Ancient Near East strives for a comprehensive, comparative and integrative approach to writing the history of the communities and states of Western Asia and Egypt from prehistory to the conquests of Alexander the Great. The work of a diverse group of international and internationally recognized scholars, the five volumes are edited by Karen Radner (LMU Munich), Nadine Moeller (Yale) and Dan Potts (NYU) and showcase the latest epigraphic and archaeological discoveries in 65 chapters that will be of use to both students and professionals alike. more

Physical violence is a universal cultural feature and in evidence throughout history. Surveying the history of mankind reveals no improvement. Nonetheless, the forms and extent of violence are subject to historical change. The project aims to understand the ways in which extreme forms of violence are prohibited and permitted, as well as thematised in media, in order to reveal very specific cultural rules and patterns of organisation. more

A German and French team directed by Prof. Dr. Martin Zimmermann (LMU Munich) and Prof. Jacques des Courtils (University of Bordeaux) is conducting a cooperative study of the settlement history of Lycia, with particular emphasis of the Xanthos valley. The project is funded by DFG and ANR with around one million euros. more