Martin Worthington

Visiting Research Scholar 2017-18

Martin Worthington is lecturer in Assyriology at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St John’s College. His first degree was in Ancient History and Egyptology (UCL, 2000), but he has since specialised in Akkadian language, literature and philology, writing Teach Yourself Complete Babylonian (Hodder, 2010) and Principles of Akkadian Textual Criticism (De Gruyter, 2012).

He was a Junior Research Fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge, and a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at SOAS, University of London. He has taught Akkadian (and Sumerian) in Cambridge, Chengdu, London, Moscow and Udine. 

Martin’s project during his time at ISAW is to write a volume of literary-critical essays on the “minor masterpieces” of Babylonian literature. 

One of these essays will be on the folk tale of The Poor Man of Nippur, which together with colleagues and students in Cambridge he recently made into a film in the original language, to be released open-access online in the coming months.  In the same vein, in 2010 he created a website of recordings of Babylonian and Assyrian poetry: https://www.soas.ac.uk/baplar/recordings/.