Fiammetta Gori

Fiammetta Gori is an Assyriologist specializing in the economic and institutional history of Western Asia in the early to mid-third millennium BCE, as well as the historiography of Ancient Near Eastern studies. She earned a BA in Cultural Heritage and an MA in Archaeology from the University of Florence (2017 and 2020), and a PhD in Archaeology, Art History, and History from the University of Verona (2024). Prior to joining ISAW, she was Wissenschaftliche Assistentin at the Institute for Assyriology and Hittitology, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (2022–2026). She has also contributed to several collaborative projects funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR) under the PRIN (Projects of Significant National Interest) program (2020–2026), including Big-DEA (Big Data and Early Archives: Measuring Settlement Dynamics and Environmental Exploitation in the Ebla Region During the 3rd Millennium BC through Archaeological Records, Cuneiform Texts, and Remote Sensing), DiWA (Dialogues between Ancient Western Asia and Us: Untold Stories from Italian Collections and Archives), and ALandA (Ancient Landscapes of Anatolia in the Bronze Age).

The cuneiform archives of Ebla (Tell Mardikh, Syria), dating to the twenty-fourth century BCE, lie at the heart of her research. As one of the oldest and largest corpora of administrative records, they not only shed light on the flow of goods, people, and information during the mid-third millennium BCE, but also provide a snapshot of how early knowledge systems worked, namely, how quantities were recorded, understood, and valued. More broadly, the relationship between administrative practices and political economy underpins her work, leading her to explore what cuneiform archives reveal about government and the development of administration both as a system of external memory and as a state-level apparatus of management. Building on this, her research also considers how these sources have been interpreted and displayed in the modern world, with a particular focus on museum collections and the modern reception of ancient Western Asia. She examines how Assyriological scholarship, archaeological practice, and collecting have shaped present-day understandings of the region, and how these practices continue to influence both academic interpretations and public perceptions of ancient Western Asia, especially in relation to ongoing debates about colonialism, cultural heritage, and the uses of the past.

At ISAW, she is developing the project "Merchants, Markets, and Power in Early Western Asia: Reconstructing Ebla's Trade Economy," examining how traders and palace authorities organized and documented long-distance trade in the mid-third millennium BCE.