Céline Debourse, "Babylon on the Cusp" (Wright Lecture in Ancient Near Eastern Studies)

We are delighted to invite you to the inaugural Wright Lecture in Ancient Near Eastern Studies, on Monday, November 3rd, 2025, at the University of Melbourne.

Céline Debourse (Harvard) will deliver a lecture titled "Babylon on the Cusp: Cuneiform Culture From Antiquity to Late Antiquity."

• Lecture: 4:15 PM–6:00 PM, Forum Theatre (Arts West, North Wing, Level 1, Room 153)

Abstract:
Babylon on the Cusp: Cuneiform Culture From Antiquity to Late Antiquity
The history of the city of Babylon has many endings. In 539 BCE the Persians conquered the city, effectively removing native kingship and bringing an end to a millennia-old political and ideological system. In 331 BCE, Alexander the Great was welcomed into the city, bringing with him new ideas and practices from the West. The arrival of the Parthians in 141 BCE further diminished the light of cuneiform culture, which decidedly ended around 75 BCE with the writing of the last recovered cuneiform tablet. To most scholars, these last six centuries of cuneiform culture form the slow decline of a great civilization up until its eventual death, after which it disappeared without leaving many traces in the subsequent cultures of the region. In this talk, however, I want to tell a different story—one that reimagines the end of cuneiform culture as a transformation. I will explore how cuneiform culture adapted, persisted, and remolded itself in new contexts, urging us to reconsider its end in an existence beyond the last tablet.

Dr. Céline Debourse is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She is a specialist in the scholarly and priestly culture of first-millennium BCE Mesopotamia, and an expert in the Akkadian language. Her first book was Of Priests and Kings: The Babylonian New Year Festival in the Last Age of Cuneiform Culture (Brill, 2022). She is currently at work on a study of how rituals were textualized in cuneiform culture, and on a book on the twilight of cuneiform culture, provisionally titled Babylon Beyond Cuneiform: Reimagining the End of a Culture (331 BCE–224 CE).

The Wright Lecture is made possible by the generosity of FANES Patron Dr. J.J. Kim Wright.