In the Spotlight – Daniel Schwemer at the University of Würzburg

Dear Mar Shiprim Readers,

This month we meet Daniel Schwemer, chair of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Würzburg University. We thank Prof. Schwemer for taking the time to share the latest from a range of projects relating to the world of the Hittites as well as religious and ritual texts from first-millennium Mesopotamia, while weighing in on recent AI developments pertaining to digitization of cuneiform texts.

With best wishes for the semester ahead,

Pavla Rosenstein
Mar Shiprim Editor

 

 

In the Spotlight – Daniel Schwemer at the University of Würzburg

 

Can you please introduce yourself? How did you come to study and work in the field, and what path led you to your current role?

There are a few Assyriologist colleagues who got interested in cuneiform already during childhood and delved straight into the world of ancient Near Eastern cultures after having finished school. I belong among the majority of colleagues who took a more winding road into the field.

I grew up in Tübingen, learned Latin and Greek at the local Uhland-Gymnasium, and got keenly interested in history, ancient languages, and the history of religions. Having finished school, I perpetuated my adolescent rebellion (and interest in Latin) by becoming a novice in the Benedictine monastery of Neresheim, where I had spent many a happy school holiday as a stroppy teenager. We sang the psalms in Latin, but I spent my spare hours studying Biblical Hebrew because I wanted to read the Hebrew poetry in the original.

The rest is quickly told: I was sent to study Theology at the University of Würzburg, where, at that time, there was a college for Benedictine students and degree courses were much more flexible than today. I went into the Bible Studies Department, met the young assistant professor Herbert Niehr (now professor emeritus, University of Tübingen), who kindly invited me to take a private Biblical Hebrew exam and join his advanced Hebrew inscriptions course (later, the two of us, assistant professor and second-year student, also travelled together through Syria by bus – those were the days). Herbert Niehr then told me that anyone seriously interested in the Hebrew Bible must study ancient Near Eastern languages more widely, and that this could be done with Gernot Wilhelm, professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies in a tiny department located on Ludwigstrasse. So off to Ludwigstrasse I went and there finally found what I really wanted to do.

I then studied at Würzburg with Gernot Wilhelm and Josef Bauer, and at Tübingen with Wolfgang Röllig and Frank Starke. Having taken my degrees in Ancient Near Eastern Studies and Theology in Würzburg, I combined doing my obligatory civil service in a care home near Ludwigstrasse with embarking on a PhD research project studying storm-gods of the ancient Near East under the supervision of Gernot Wilhelm. Having finished my PhD dissertation in 2000, I took up the position of assistant professor in Würzburg, and it was only the invitation by Stefan M. Maul for a one-year replacement professorship at the University of Heidelberg in 2004–2005 that finally made me leave Würzburg.

In 2005, I had the good fortune to be offered my first tenured position in academia, a lectureship at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. The years at SOAS were very happy in many ways, not least because of the combination of academic independence and the close cooperation and friendship with my senior colleagues, in particular Andrew R. George and my predecessor J. David Hawkins. I learned a lot during my time in London, and I only reluctantly followed the offer from Würzburg to succeed my teacher Gernot Wilhelm on the Würzburg chair for Ancient Near Eastern Studies. Subsequent developments at SOAS unfortunately proved this to be the right decision.

 

Can you tell us about the history of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Würzburg?

Any visitor to Würzburg is struck by the many (mostly Roman Catholic) churches that populate the historic city centre. So it is not due to chance that the origins of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Würzburg are closely connected to apologetic efforts of Biblical scholars who felt that the new discoveries in Mesopotamia, and the cuneiform texts in particular, had to be studied in defence of the faith and the tenets of Christian theology.

The priest Anton Scholz had become a professor of Old Testament Studies at the University in 1872, and he was instrumental in introducing the study of ancient Near Eastern cultures in Würzburg, not least by promoting Johannes F. Hehn, a student of Friedrich Delitzsch, to become his successor in 1903. Hehn promoted the establishment of a professorship of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy, and his efforts were rewarded by the appointment of Maximilian Streck to a professorship of „Semitische Philologie, Türkisch und Neupersisch“ in 1908, which was converted into a chair (ordentlicher Professor) in 1916. In this same year, Streck’s monumental edition of the inscriptions of Ashurbanipal was published, and we consider 1916 the birth date of Ancient Near Eastern Studies (ANES) at the University of Würzburg.

Since then, ANES at Würzburg has had its ups and downs. After Maximilian Streck’s retirement in 1939, the ANES section was closed during the Nazi period and, in line with the ideology and politics of the times, converted into a chair for the art history of Main-Franconia, to which Clemens Schenk, the local Gaudozentenbundführer, was appointed. In 1947, this lamentable change was reversed, and Theo Bauer was tasked with re-establishing Orientalische Philologie in a city ravaged by war, crime, and misguided ideology (1947–1956). In the time of his successor Wilhelm Eilers (1958–1973), big plans for founding an institute with several positions covering the Middle Eastern cultures from the beginning of writing to the present day eventually foundered due to Bavarian higher education policy, which sought to spread academic disciplines across the various, in part newly founded, universities in the northern part of the state. So today, modern languages of the Middle East can be studied at Bamberg and Erlangen, whereas ANES survived in Würzburg as part of an Institut für Altertumswissenschaften that was founded during Gernot Wilhelm’s tenure (1988–2010). Würzburg’s profile, which combines Assyriology with a focus on Hittite Studies, was expanded by Wilhelm, who succeeded Heinrich Otten and Erich Neu as director of the Hethitische Forschungen project at the Mainz Academy and as epigraphist of the excavations at Boğazköy-Hattusa. The roots of this profile reach further back to the time of his predecessor, Einar von Schuler, who served as Professor für Orientalische Philologie from 1974 to 1987. Those who would like to know more about the history of ANES in Würzburg can turn to the little volume 100 Jahre Altorientalistik in Würzburg 1916–2016 (2019).

 

Can you tell us more about the current faculty and students, including recent hires?
Currently, we have three regular positions in Ancient Near Eastern philology, held by Claus Ambos (tenured), Marie Barkowsky (untenured assistant professorship), and myself. Ancient Near Eastern archaeology is part of the same section, with two professorships, one held by Stephanie Döpper, the other by Martin Gruber. In addition to this core team, we usually have about ten colleagues in our section who are hired on term contracts for specific research projects.

The addition of archaeology to Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Würzburg is a recent development, enabled in 2021 by the award of a significant grant from the Volkswagen-Stiftung as part of a funding programme for the strategic development of ‘small disciplines.’ The cooperation between philologists and archaeologists in the study programmes, research, and daily institute life is precious to me personally and sets Würzburg apart from other places. Our close ties to Andreas Schachner (German Archaeological Institute, Istanbul) form an important element of this structure.

Würzburg seems to be a good place for postdoctoral researchers who want to take the next step towards a tenured position in ANES: former ‘Würzburger’ in professorial positions include Nils P. Heeßel (Marburg), Michele Cammarosano (Napoli), James M. Burgin (Chicago), and, most recently, Beatrice Baragli (Florence) and Dahlia Shehata (Heidelberg). Some of our graduates find permanent posts in our research projects (e.g., Charles W. Steitler, researcher on the Hittite Festival Texts project).

 

What academic programmes are available for undergraduate and graduate students? What about doctoral and postdoctoral research opportunities?
At BA level, you can study Ancient Near Eastern Studies or Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology as one subject of a two-subject degree; you can also combine the two to make up one full BA programme. At MA level, you continue your studies in a two-subject combination or focus on only one subject. All our MA programmes are two-year degrees; entry requirements currently include knowledge of German (B2) and, for the philological MA, a BA degree in ANES or a minimum knowledge of Akkadian equivalent to four semester courses. Details of the course programme can easily be found on our website. PhD students attend courses depending on their prior training and interests. All advanced courses have current research built into their teaching programme. Funding for PhD students is available through some of our projects but, as with most German universities, there is no general, fully funded PhD programme with annual application deadlines.

In ANES, the philological BA training comprises Akkadian, Sumerian, and Hittite. The curriculum starts with Akkadian in year one, whereas Sumerian and Hittite are introduced in years two and three. Courses in other languages are offered occasionally, often in response to the interests of our current students. We do have special courses on the use of digital methods in the study of ancient Near Eastern cultures. Students of archaeology participate in the various fieldwork projects (currently two in the Hittite capital Boğazköy-Hattusa, one in Oman, one in Azerbaijan, and one in Iraq in preparation). A special highlight of the degree programmes is our interdisciplinary field trips, which we organize every second year. This past spring we travelled through southern Türkiye from Adana to Diyarbakır.

 

There are a number of research projects under your direction at Würzburg. Could you tell us more about them?
The projects under my direction reflect my main research interests: on the one hand, religious and ritual texts from first-millennium Mesopotamia in Akkadian and Sumerian, and, on the other hand, the world of the Hittites, including work as an excavation epigraphist at Boğazköy-Hattusa and Kayalıpınar-Samuha.

The core component of the Hittitological research strategy is the project Corpus der hethitischen Festrituale (HFR), funded by the Union of German Academies for the period 2016–2036. This project, with centres at the Mainz Academy of Sciences and the Universities of Marburg and Würzburg, investigates the large corpus of Hittite festival texts with the ultimate goal of reconstructing the cults of the Hittite empire, their historical development, their practice and theology, as well as their social, economic, and political contexts. This long-term project currently maintains the Hethitologie-Portal Mainz (HPM), the international digital infrastructure of Hittite Studies hosting a great variety of online text editions, digital tools, and databases. In the context of HPM, colleagues in Würzburg and elsewhere continually plan and generate new research projects. In Würzburg, I would like to highlight TLH^dig, the comprehensive, constantly growing online transliteration database for cuneiform texts from Hittite archives. While HPM as such will turn 25 next year, TLH^dig is a relatively new component that was first published online in 2023 but has already transformed the research routines of Hittitologists. Other projects in this context are Hittite Divinatory Texts (HDivT), a long-term digital edition project that will also include in-depth studies of Hittite divination practices, and Tive, a project that revives the longstanding research on Hurrian at Würzburg and will produce a digital text corpus and lexicon of the Hurrian language. All three projects, TLH^dig, HDivT, and Tive, receive(d) funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), which offers great opportunities for basic research in the humanities, including for colleagues who want to come to Germany from abroad. I would also like to emphasize that all three projects are collaborative in nature, with colleagues at the Universities of Marburg and Mainz, LMU Munich, as well as the Mainz Academy involved in their development, leadership, and implementation.

A different kind of cooperation in the research on the history and culture of the Hittites is illustrated by the two current projects funded by the Volkswagen-Stiftung. In Digital Pathways to the Hittite World, we explore digital methods for the analysis and presentation of texts and archaeological objects in cooperation with the Centre for Philology and Digitality of our University. In Show me the Capital of the Hittites!, we are preparing an online guide tool for the Hittite capital based on the ArchaeoTrail app developed by Stephanie Döpper in one of her previous projects. Both enterprises are add-ons to the large Volkswagen-Stiftung grant that enabled the establishment of ANE archaeology in Würzburg and are conducted in close collaboration with the archaeological mission in Boğazköy-Hattusa (German Archaeological Institute, Istanbul).

After the completion of the Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-witchcraft Rituals, I wanted to continue my research in Akkadian and Sumerian rituals and incantations and thought in particular about working on Bīt mēseri, still not comprehensively edited at the time, though clearly one of the key texts of first-millennium Mesopotamian ritual lore. I was fortunate to find like-minded colleagues in Egyptology and Comparative Philology. Together, we established the DFG-funded Centre for Advanced Study MagEIA: Magic between Entanglement, Interaction, and Analogy — A Centre for the Study of Magical Text Traditions of West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean in Antiquity. This Centre not only gave me the research time required to complete my book on Bīt mēseri but has so far also brought more than thirty visiting fellows from more than twenty different countries to Würzburg, all of them working on one of the many traditions of magical texts. The first phase of MagEIA comes to an end next year, but we do hope to be successful in applying for a second phase, which will, among many other things, have the objective of producing a truly collaborative, interdisciplinary handbook of magical texts in ancient cultures. An exciting prospect, and hopefully many more opportunities to bring interested colleagues to the Würzburg MagEIA House for a period of time.

This is only a selection of the current projects, and there are quite a few others directed by my colleagues here in Würzburg, some of them here only for the duration of their project, others permanent members of staff. You can explore them on our website, and if you are interested in bringing your research to Würzburg, please be in touch.

 

Your work has led to long-term collaborations with partner institutions and colleagues in Türkiye. Are there any you would particularly like to highlight? What opportunities are there for students and scholars to engage in similar cross-cultural work?
Working in the host countries of our research is a great privilege and joy for me. The presence and expertise of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) in those countries is extremely helpful if you are not based abroad but work at a German university. Personally, I have served as excavation epigraphist at Boğazköy-Hattusa since 2012 (DAI Istanbul), and more recently I have also become involved in the fieldwork at Kayalıpınar-Samuha (Koç University) and, as a visiting researcher, at Oylum Höyük (Gaziantep University). I feel that it is a great honour to be tasked with the decipherment and publication of newly found fragments. Often the individual find seems insignificant, but it is research at the very beginning of the ‘food chain’, and it is gratifying to see how fragments that I documented some years ago are then used in other people’s research and contribute to a better understanding of some aspect of ANE cultures.

Besides the excavations, the museums are important partners, in my case in particular the Anadolu Medeniyetleri Müzesi in Ankara and the Eski Şark Eserleri Müzesi in Istanbul. And then there are the many colleagues at the universities with whom you can also build ties for students through Erasmus or similar programmes (Würzburg ANES currently has agreements with Istanbul University, Ankara University, and Hitit Üniversitesi in Çorum). There are many opportunities for field and museum work, though at the start the bureaucratic hurdles and linguistic-cultural barriers feel very daunting. It is important to start building one’s network and overcoming barriers early on (I waited too long). For students, studying for a period at a university in Türkiye, working on an excavation, or doing an internship at another institution can be a great start to getting to know the country, language, people, and culture.

 

The Palaeographicum tool that grew out of the DFG-funded CuKa project has recently made headlines. You commented that “The Palaeographicum is radically changing our work; it allows us to save thousands of hours.” Could you please expand on its capability to match handwriting styles and on its potential across palaeography more broadly?
Gerfrid Müller, one of my colleagues on the HFR project and technical director of HPM from the very beginning, has worked on the digital analysis of cuneiform writing based on 3D models and digital photographs for many years. The Palaeographicum is the first major publication of these efforts. It offers users palaeographic lists of several million sign attestations based on an extraction of the relevant sign forms from the digitized collection of photographs in the Hittitology Archive of the Mainz Academy. While these photos have been available online to researchers for many years on the HPM platform, the palaeographic dating and comparison of Hittite cuneiform tablets remained extremely laborious manual work, in which we created our own palaeographic tables by drawing signs or cutting them from photos and inserting them into the tables. These palaeographic tables are now produced by the machine, and users can quickly (in just a few clicks) compare palaeographic tables of various tablets based on the Mainz photos. This is of course only a first milestone, but it already accelerates working routines enormously without reducing the quality or comprehensiveness of the data. The automated sign recognition on photos is only one element of Gerfrid’s work in this area. An expansion to 3D models is well underway, and the final goal is to have the automated digital metrology of scripts facilitate the recognition of the same handwriting. This would further support the finding of joins between fragments and contribute significantly to a better understanding of writing practices and, in the end, the sociology of scribes and experts.

 

The Palaeographicum uses AI in its analysis of individual signs. How do you see the increasing use of AI within Assyriology and related fields impacting research and scholarship? What do you think are some of the potential benefits and pitfalls of which scholars should be aware?
AI will keep on accelerating the analysis of our data, both in pattern recognition and the use of LLMs, for example in automated grammatical tagging. At the same time, the digital availability and searchability of photos, 3D models, and text corpora will become the norm. I think we should embrace these new possibilities, which also means that today’s students will (have to) grow from users of these resources into the next generation of creators. There are pitfalls, of course. I would like to mention only three of them: first, the quality of the data we work with depends not only on the machines but still primarily on the human decipherer and philologist. So the basic skills of cuneiform studies must continue to be taught, and the study of the original artefacts remains key. Second, the creation of online resources presents opportunities for commercialization and the erection of barriers; not least because in our host countries the financial resources in academia are usually limited, we must resist this temptation. Third, and most importantly: digital data and user interfaces (even if well-structured and standard-compliant) require maintenance, and this incurs significant costs far beyond the lifetime of individual projects and researchers. The continuous availability and further development of the major digital platforms of our field over generations are a challenge that demands strategic planning, cross-platform cooperation, constant research initiatives that generate funding, and the committed infrastructure support of academic institutions. Overall, I think that digitization and machine learning offer a lot of opportunities to cuneiform studies and comparable fields; the real risks come from other quarters: higher education as a for-profit industry, national chauvinism, and the seemingly never-ending wars and conflicts in many of our host countries. As individual academics, we have little influence on the general trends and political turmoil of our times, but there are, of course, situations at our institutions, in our international collaboration, and in our handling of research data and research results, where our decisions and preferences make a difference. In a more hostile societal and political environment, independent associations like the IAA may also acquire new significance, and the history of associations like the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft or the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft offers lessons worth learning.

 

To learn more about the University of Würzburg and current projects, please visit:

Würzburg ANES: https://www.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de/altorientalistik/

MagEIA: https://www.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de/mageia/

HPM: https://hethport.net/

 

Interview by Pavla Rosenstein