First ASOR European Symposium in Paris

In the beginning of September the American Schools of Oriental Research organised for the first time a conference in Europe. The ASOR/EPHE-PSL European Symposium (4–6th Sept) gathered together scholars from various fields of ancient Near Eastern studies. The conference took place at the Sorbonne University in Paris, and it was focused on two themes: (1) interaction between violence, order and conflict within the political sphere and (2) digital approaches to the study of ancient world.

Six members of the Centre of Excellence in Ancient Near Eastern Empires presented their work at the conference. Shana Zaia and Joanna Töyräänvuori presented their work in the field of political world, Zaia with the topic Shepherding the Land and People: Internal Control and State Violence in the Ancient Near East and Töyräänvuori with the topic The Ugaritic Chaoskampf Myth and Egypto-Hittite Political Relations in Late Bronze Age. The other four presented various digital approaches. Tero Alstola researched by pointwise mutual information (PMI) and Word2vec semantic domains in Akkadian texts. Tommi Jauhiainen applied supervised machine learning for automatic identification of language and dialect in cuneiform texts. Johannes Bach presented an upcoming database of narrative elements of Assyrian royal texts with the title Digitalization and the literary history of Assyrian royal narrative texts, and Heidi Jauhiainen presented her analysis of Mesopotamian divine names utilising FastText method.

All the sessions were broadcasted live and the recordings are published in Youtube.