Living in a Culture of the Past: The Life and Work of a Scribe in Hellenistic Uruk

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW.

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The figure of the scribe is essential to any discussion of ancient Mesopotamian culture. Decades of careful research have allowed historians to paint a general portrait of the Mesopotamian scribe that can then be placed into historical narratives. But what about the individuals from whom this composite picture was created? “Living in a Culture of the Past: The Life and Work of a Scribe in Hellenistic Uruk” is a microhistorical study of the life and work of a particular scribe who lived in the southern Mesopotamian city of Uruk in the late fourth century BCE. His name was Iqīšā, the son of Ištar-šum-ereš, of the Ekur-zakir clan. This talk examines of the ways that Iqīšā identified himself in the colophons of the traditional texts that he copied and demonstrates how the study of a single ancient individual's life and work can lead to productive new insights about continuity, change, and power in Babylonia in the early Hellenistic period.

Abigail Hoskins is a Visiting Research Scholar at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. She received her Ph.D. in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2024, her Masters from Berkeley in 2019, and her B.A. in Classics and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from the University of Chicago in 2015. Abigail's research focuses on issues of continuity and change between the Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods, tradition and innovation in Babylonian scribal culture, and moments of contact and exchange between Greece and Mesopotamia.

The lecture will be followed by a reception.

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