Congratulations to this year’s IAA prize winners!
by Pavla Rosenstein
Two dissertation prize winners for 2023
This year’s dissertation prize was awarded to two winners, Clélia Paladre for “Les sceaux-cylindres proto-élamites: productions d’un phénomène revisité” and Tomoki Kitazumi for “Übersetzungstätigkeit und Übersetzungsverfahren im hethitischen Reich.”
Paladre, who completed her dissertation at the University of Paris, Panthéon-Sorbonne under the direction of Pascal Butterlin (University of Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne) and Holly Pittman (University of Pennsylvania), explored proto-urban developments at the turn of the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE across the Iranian Plateau. Analyzing glyptic productions, Paladre utilized a cross-disciplinary approach that combined art history and archaeology in order to better define and model the proto-Elamite phenomenon.
Clélia Paladre on site at Girdi Qala, Kurdistan). Photograph by Hugo Naccaro.
On receiving the prize, Paladre says, “The proto-Elamite period is fascinating, yet often overshadowed by that of Uruk. This prize means a lot to me, rewarding years of hard work, backed and supported by my mentor Holly Pittman. The ideas I develop in my thesis try to break away from preconceived notions, and I’m very honored to have them recognized and praised here.”
Kitazumi, who completed his dissertation at the Freie Universität Berlin under Jörg Klinger (Freie Universität Berlin) and Mark Geller (University College London), sought to show how scribes in the Hittite empire approached translation. As he puts it, “Even if the reason for producing a translation cannot always be determined so clearly, the fact remains that there is such an immense but fascinating amount in such a wide variety of genres, and it was hardly the case in any other cultures in antiquity.”
The source languages examined by Kitazumi are Hattic, Hurrian, and Akkadian, with Hittite as the target language. He utilized methodologies employed in translation studies, analyzing not only grammatical issues between each source language and Hittite, but also commenting on philology and semantics. He explains further, “In terms of intercultural history, I was able to show that there is still a lot of terra incognita in the history of translation which is not even recognized as such. I am very excited that more of these will be “discovered” and that we will learn more and more about this fascinating chapter of human communication.”
Tomoki Kitazumi. Photograph by M. Okamoto
It was particularly challenging to choose a single winner for this year’s IAA dissertation prize, as the quality of submissions was high and covered a wide range of topics. Jan Tavernier, Professor, Université Catholique de Louvain and elected IAA board member, comments that, “the IAA Dissertation Prize has been awarded to two winners for the first time in its history. As the difference in general quality – structure, clarity, scientific values – between both dissertations was so small the Board saw no alternative to awarding the Prize to both authors.”
First article prize
George Heath-Whyte won this year’s prize for the best first article written after a PhD, with “Patterns of Life in the Babylonian Long Sixth Century BC: A Study of Dated Legal Tablets from Private Archives,” Archiv für Orient Forschungen 55 (2022).
Heath-Whyte, who is currently a Research Associate at Tyndale House, a UK-based research institute for biblical scholarship, revised previous research for his Master’s thesis at Oxford University for the article. He sought to answer questions regarding day- to- day life during the “long sixth century” under the Neo-Babylonian Empire in the first millennium BCE, by analyzing frequencies of thousands of dated cuneiform texts from the private archives of Babylonian individuals.
Heath-Whyte found evidence indicating that a five-day week may have been observed during the period in Babylonia. He comments, “I’m honoured to have received this prize, and very grateful to those who helped me in producing the work, most of all to Frances Reynolds and Jacob Dahl, who supervised the Master’s thesis on which it is based. There’s a lot still to learn about ancient patterns of life, and it’s my hope that the sorts of methods used in this article can bear fruit in the study of other corpora and time periods.”
George Heath-Whyte in front of the Gilgamesh XI Flood Tablet housed at the British Museum (K.3375). Photograph by Josh Sherwood.
Alexander Pruß, professor at Johannes-Gutenberg University in Mainz/Germany and member of the IAA board adds, that “The committee responsible for awarding the prize was particularly impressed by the author’s thoroughness in his study of the Neo-Babylonian’s temporal concepts. His well-structured article is written in a clear and concise manner and highlights both the scope and potential limitations of the evidence.”
Applications for next year’s prizes are now open.
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