Core Team Ancient Near Eastern Studies

Daniel Schwemer is the PI responsible for leading the core team of Ancient Near Eastern Studies (see PIs). His research in phase 1 of MagEIA is dedicated to the previously unedited Babylonian-Assyrian ritual Bīt mēseri ("House of Enclosure"). The text edition and his further research on this key text of Mesopotamian magic scholarship will be published as a book entitled "Magic of Space and Time: The Bīt mēseri ritual". For the end of the overall term of MagEIA, he is planning a book with the working title "Magic in Ancient Mesopotamia", which will offer a comprehensive and accessible account of magico-religious ideas, practices, and texts in the ancient Near Eastern periods of Mesopotamian history.

Further information and contact details.

Postdoctoral researcher of the core team Ancient Near Eastern Studies (CV and publications).
Contact: beatrice.baragli@uni-wuerzburg.de; Tel.: +49 931 3188562‬
Beatrice Baragli is an Assyriologist whose interests include the history of Sumerian literature, rituals, ancient Near Eastern religions with a focus on the role of the sun god Utu/Šamaš and Sumerian-Akkadian bilingualism. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she worked on the Sumerian language of the first millennium BCE. Her dissertation was a critical edition of the Sumerian Kiutu incantation-prayers to the sun god. In the first phase of MagEIA, she will analyse the purification ritual for the king Bīt rimki ("bathhouse") with regard to its points of comparison with the other royal rituals of the ancient Near East.