Friends of ASOR present the next webinar of the 2024-2025 season on September 18, 2024, at 7:00 pm EDT, presented by Prof. Petra Creamer. This webinar will be free and open to the public. Registration through Zoom (with a valid email address) is required.

Have you ever wondered what the afterlife was like in ancient Mesopotamia?  The complicated world of death has a long and nuanced history throughout various civilizations in the Land Between Rivers.  Community identity, family, status, gender, and many more variables played into how one would be buried and what they could expect to encounter in the afterlife awaiting them. During the Assyrian Empire (c. 1350-612 BCE) some funerary traditions were kept from previous periods, while others were newly introduced.  New imperial pressures, migration patterns, and forced resettlement during the Assyrian Empire beget a new set of mortuary norms.  At the same time, some groups struggled to maintain their traditions in the face of a changing social and political landscape.  This talk explores the variety of funerary traditions present in the Assyrian Empire and how they changed over time – telling us just as much about those alive as those deceased.

Petra Creamer is an Assistant Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Emory University, studying the genesis and growth of empires and the impact of empires on the non-elite populations under their hegemony.  She is director of the excavation project Rural Landscapes of Iron Age Imperial Mesopotamia, where her ongoing fieldwork addresses long-term settlement patterns and lifeways in the ancient Assyrian imperial core (c. 1350-600 BCE). She has conducted fieldwork in Iraqi Kurdistan, Iraq, Turkey, Oman, Italy, Azerbaijan, Greece, and the U.S.A. Her current book project ties together multiple levels of looking at Assyrian imperial power – from broad landscape management down to individual burials – to understand the degree of control Assyrian elites held over those under imperial hegemony.

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