Dear Mar Shiprim readers,
Please join us in congratulating William McGrath (University of Toronto) for winning this year’s IAA dissertation prize, Christopher W. Jones (Union University) for winning this year’s IAA first article prize and Alessia Pilloni (Freie Universität Berlin) for receiving an honorable mention for her first article. All three have taken time to reflect on their work below.
Applications are now open for next year’s prizes. For more information, see https://iaassyriology.com/awards.
With warm wishes for the upcoming academic year,
Pavla Rosenstein
Mar Shiprim Editor
Congratulations to this year’s IAA prize winners!
Dissertation prize
This year’s dissertation prize was awarded to William McGrath for his dissertation “Resurgent Babylon: A Cultural, Political and Intellectual History of the Second Dynasty of Isin,” supervised by Paul Alain-Beaulieu.
William McGrath (image courtesy of William McGrath).
Jan Tavernier, Professor, Université Catholique de Louvain and chair of the IAA dissertation Award IAA committee, comments that, “After the particular situation of last year, when the IAA awarded the prize to two laureates, we returned back to normal this year. This year’s laureate wrote an outstanding dissertation on the Post-Kassite Second Dynasty of Isin. Outstanding not only because of its clarity and nice structure, but also because of the new ideas expressed in it (without automatically discarding older theories), inter alia on Enuma Elish and the rise of Marduk to the supreme god of Babylon. This is really a dissertation that, once published, will be an extremely important contribution to the fields of Assyriology, Elamology and even Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology.”
McGrath reflects that, “The broad understanding and deep perspective into Babylonian studies required to select the Isin II dynasty as a prospective topic belonged to my advisor, Prof. Paul-Alain Beaulieu, who was kind enough to make the suggestion to me. Upon studying the major treatments by Olmstead, Wiseman and Brinkman, my inspiration really materialized, and I wanted to produce a work that would address the challenge of standing in such company, demonstrate my esteem for prior accomplishments, but offer at the same time, an updated and reformulated treatment. The continuation of the search for facts, which was not a novel idea but a Herodotean one, seemed like the way to do that.”
The first stage of McGrath’s project involved an extensive overhaul of the work on the Isin II period in the last fifty years, which produced two major foci: political history, typified by the work of Brinkman, and literary-theological innovation, typified by the work of Lambert. Next, came the study of newly available texts. McGrath explains that, “I was able to draw on a corpus of texts roughly one-third larger than that available at the time of the last major study of the dynasty, however, many of these texts are quite laconic. Despite the difficulties presented by the evidence, my work represents the first attempt to set the events of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar I into a fixed and definite timeline which, in turn, carries new and significant implications for the transition of Babylonian geopolitics from the Elamite-Assyrian phase.”
McGrath was awarded €1,500 for his work, which is intended to provide assistance for the publication of the dissertation. “I am honored to receive this prize and I would like to extend my thanks to those who were most directly involved in providing one sort of academic support or another, namely, Prof. Paul-Alain Beaulieu, Prof. Heather Baker, Dr. Jon Taylor and Mr. Christopher B. F. Walker,” he says.
First article prize
The committee for the Best First Article Award of the IAA has unanimously decided to award this year’s first article prize to Christopher W. Jones for his article “Failed Coup: The Assassination of Sennacherib and Esarhaddon’s Struggle for the Throne, 681–680 B.C,” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History 10 (2023): 293-369.
“His article on a well-known topic is clearly written and deeply researched,” comments Jana Mynářová, chair of the committee. “Based on a broad familiarity with the sources he is able to add new and significant details to the story. His complex and thorough discussion of the state of research enables him to make informed and well-argued points of his own to either support or refute previous scholarship.”
Christopher W. Jones. Photograph by Monica Jones.
“This article was a long time coming,” says Jones, currently Assistant Professor of History at Union University. “Its origins lie in an Akkadian course I took with Dr. Adam Miglio while a Master’s student at Wheaton College in 2014, where we read the letter first published by Parpola in “The Murderer of Sennacherib” in 1980. The dramatic content of the letter and its ability to shed light on empire-shaking events otherwise known only through royal inscriptions certainly made an impression. Four years later, as a PhD student at Columbia, I was compiling a list of unpublished joins from the Kuyunjik Collection in preparation for a visit to the British Museum, when I noticed that this same letter had an additional fragment added.”
Jones requested to examine the tablet (SAA 18 100 + K. 21923), only to find that it was in the conservation lab. Fortunately, curator Imran Javed tracked it down in a batch of tablets that had not yet been re-shelved. “The join had been made by Jeanette Fincke in 2005, but she never published it and was happy for me to do so,” says Jones. “My adviser, Prof. Marc Van De Mieroop, encouraged me to publish it as a short piece in NABU the following year. While writing my dissertation, I kept coming across other letters which related to the events surrounding the assassination, and which previous studies on the topic had not considered. That’s when the idea took root to do a new study comprehensively re-examining the evidence,” he continues.
Two letters in particular (SAA 10 109 and SAA 16 29) stuck with Jones. He explains that “both were written by officials who had supported Esarhaddon in the aftermath of Sennacherib’s assassination, expecting him to return the favor by solving their personal problems. Both mention that they were with the king in a place called Isītu, literally “the tower” in Akkadian, which previously stumped the few people who tried to determine its location. Then I came across an old article by Hartmut Kühne and Andreas Luther in NABU (1998/117) where they identify the Aramaic “Magdalu” (“the tower”) as an alternative name for Dur-Katlimmu. That started me on a deep dive into the Dur-Katlimmu excavations, and I ended up delaying work on my article to await the 2022 publication of the excavations of the citadel at that site!”
Jones was not alone in working on the topic during the pandemic. He recalls that, “Unbeknownst to me, Stephanie Dalley and Luis Siddall had also been working on the same letter, which they published in Iraq in 2021. Their work helped me improve my own translation, but we came to very different interpretations of the same text. At the same time, several other authors published articles attempting to revive Landsberger and Bauer’s 1926 proposal that Esarhaddon had masterminded his father’s assassination. That’s when my article started to take shape not just as a re-statement of the evidence but as something that would respond to these pieces and vindicate Parpola’s identification of Urad-Mullissu as the mastermind of the assassination.”
Jones completed the article, an extensive 77 pages, through the summer and fall of 2022, while beginning a post-doctoral position at the University of Helsinki’s Center of Excellence in the Ancient Near Eastern Empires. “The texts from Dur-Katlimmu contained plenty of evidence that an estate of the crown prince existed in the city, allowing me to put together an argument that Esarhaddon was located in Dur-Katlimmu at the time of his father’s assassination. Studies of modern coups d’état gave me the framework for interpreting Esarhaddon’s actions after the assassination as a series of attempts to manipulate elite opinion to give the impression that his victory was inevitable,” he adds.
Jones received €1,000 as part of his prize. He comments that, “I’m honored that my article has received this award and I hope the recognition will help it reach a wider audience.”
First article runner-up
The committee also unanimously decided to declare Alessia Pilloni’s article, “The Astrological Schemes Behind bīt niṣirtu and KI in the Babylonian Horoscopes,” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History, vol. 11, no. 1, 2024, pp. 1-26., as a runner-up of this year’s prize, receiving €250. Mynářová comments that, “the author juggles the streams of evidence and the required calculations well, and shows that some of the Babylonian Horoscopes made very specific use of certain terms. By explaining these terms in their context, she indicates broader ramifications for understanding how Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, and Indian astrology are interrelated.”
Alessia Pilloni at the British Museum. Photograph by Prof. Mathieu Ossendrijver.
Pilloni is currently completing her PhD on late Babylonian astral sciences at FU Berlin as part of the ERC project ZODIAC – Ancient Astral Science in Transformation. She says that, “I got intrigued by the Babylonian horoscopes’ previously unclear astrological terminology (bīt niṣirtu “house of secrecy” and KI “place”). I was able to determine the schemes and variations on which these terms are based through their roots in earlier astral divinatory texts. Nowadays, the practice of casting horoscopes is very popular, although the actual concept originated in the third century BCE. Babylonia. Whereas modern horoscopes put emphasis on the solar zodiacal sign and the Ascendant at the time of birth, we now know that horoscopic practices in Babylonia focused on applications of the triplicities of the planets.”
“It is very encouraging to get such positive feedback at this very early stage of my research,” Pilloni continues. “I am extremely grateful for the prize, and I hope this small discovery will lead to broader results for our understanding of Babylonian astral practices, as well as their trans-cultural reception and adaptation.”
Applications for next year’s prizes are now open.
For more details about the IAA dissertation prize, visit:
For more details about the first article prize, visit:
https://iaassyriology.com/iaa-prize
_
Article by Pavla Rosenstein