The project Embodied Emotions: Ancient Mesopotamia and Today was granted funding by the Finnish Cultural Foundation in September 2022 and will run until 2026. It explores how emotions were embodied by people in the past compared with the present. How did the embodiment of emotions differ in the ancient times due to cultural differences, stemming from differences in the ways the human body, physiology and emotions were understood? The comparison will tell us whether one of the oldest Semitic languages, Akkadian, verbalizes different emotions with similar body-related expressions as modern languages.
The project approaches the largest papyrus archive to have survived from ancient Egypt – the Zenon Archive (263-229 BCE) – from relational perspectives. It utilises conceptual and computational tools of (Social) Network Analysis to retrieve and model large amounts of relational and attribute data learned from 1845 Zenon papyri as different types of networks. The models and network analyses are tailored to asking questions about daily life by mapping and exploring evidence of structural dynamics and human interactions played out in 3rd century BCE Egypt and the Levant.
Funded by Kone Foundation (2023-2026)
Dr Jonathan Valk's The ARAMAIZATION project examines the rise of Aramaic writing in the Middle East in the first half of the first millennium BCE. Aramaic writing first emerged in the region of modern Syria, but soon extended throughout the Middle East in the centuries when it was ruled by the Assyrian empire. It did so despite the fact that the Assyrian empire was heavily invested in the production of texts written in the Akkadian language and the cuneiform script, the inherited vehicles for an extremely prestigious writing tradition that was already two thousand years old. The project contributes to our comprehension of sociolinguistic shifts, as well as to our understanding of language choice and language change. This is relevant both for the ancient Middle East and in our own time of global linguistic and cultural flux.
ERC Advanced Grant 2023 project "Work without End: Informal Taxation and Forced Labor within Persian Southern Levantine Temple Economy and Society".
Temples in the Southern Levant during the Persian Empire (c. 539–331 BCE) provide a vital, underutilized historical vista for such questions. Persian involvement with labor taxation, forced labor, and temple institutions makes temples cynosures for key ancient economic, social, and cultural practices of work. Focusing on taxation and labor, WORK-IT drags analysis from formal to informal taxation (from official to social structures) and from slavery to forced labor (from definition to wider social phenomena), seeking deeper social interrelations for both economic topics. Both interventions furnish new fruitful perspectives on the dialectical interrelations between economy and society. Bourdieu’s field theory brings powerful tools for wider socio-economic implications that integrates practices with perceptions.
WORK-IT will harness eight types of evidence for temple institutions—building, gifts, taxes, tithes, produce, welfare, priesthoods, and dependents—using sources from the Southern Levant, the Persian imperial heartland, and the wider Ancient Near East. Each source will be analyzed via informal taxation, forced labor, and Bourdieusian field analysis to understand taxation, labor, and their interrelations within ancient weak states (pre-industrial, pre-nation-state polities).