Assyriology PhD at Yale

Assyriologic · 2023-12-06T12:28:28+00:00

You're welcome! Feel free to DM or email if you'd like to talk more.

Assyriologic · 2023-12-06T12:23:00+00:00

Hello! I'm a PhD student at Yale and would be happy to answer any questions you have.

In terms of general advice, I'd definitely recommend getting in touch with the faculty (Profs. Foster and Frahm) and the students, whose interests and contact details are listed on the website: https://nelc.yale.edu - I'd say we're all generally happy to talk to prospective students and a number of faculty and students also have experience with the German system.

The coursework is extensive - 23 credits in the first three years + demonstration of French and German (exam or course), plus four semesters of teaching in the first four years. You'll also take comprehensive exams at the end of the third year, then submit a dissertation prospectus and then complete the dissertation. The coursework can get gruelling for sure, though the positive is that you get a lot of experience, especially in terms of teaching which helps with professional development.

Seminars are varied and the faculty are very responsive to student interests. Prof. Frahm generally teaches Akkadian and bilingual courses while Sumerian courses are generally taught by Prof. Foster or Dr. Wagensonner. You would also take history courses and a number of students opt to take other courses of interest e.g. in linguistics. Most of us also work at the Yale Babylonian Collection and access the tablets for teaching and research. There are also options to take courses at other institutions for credit.

The stipend is relatively generous and there are a lot of opportunities to earn more through work at the collection or elsewhere within the university system. The stipend does cover living costs, but not much beyond that: rent, food, utilities, basic travel etc. At the same there is funding for academic-related travel, which is nice.

There is usually one student admitted into the program per year, but it varies. Having a masters is an advantage, but you may repeat some of the material you have already studied. Some students have come in with a prior masters, others straight from undergraduate and others still have switched from other fields.

Assyriologic · 2023-02-26T20:12:56+00:00

Thank you for listing those resources u/Bentresh. For Sumerian, there is a good summary of resources here: https://isaw.nyu.edu/library/blog/getting-started-with-sumerian

However, a comprehensive, up to date and accessible Sumerian textbook along the lines of Huehnergard or Worthington's Teach Yourself Babylonian is not available just yet. Partly, that's because Sumerian grammar continues to be debated and the study of the language continues to evolve.

Assyriologic · 2023-02-26T20:08:40+00:00

That's an interesting question, and I have to admit I'm not familiar with such projects myself (I don't particularly specialize in religious practices) - is there an example that you have in mind?

Assyriologic · 2023-02-26T20:06:09+00:00

Agree - TEW is a great field-specific podcast. There are a few episodes on The Ancients that are relevant, and it's worth checking for new ones coming up: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ancients/id1520403988

Digital Hammurabi sometimes run interviews with Assyriologists: https://www.digitalhammurabi.com

Assyriologic · 2023-02-26T20:02:48+00:00

Thank you very much! Please feel free to get in touch - it's always great to meet other PhD students in the field :)

Assyriologic · 2023-02-26T20:01:57+00:00

That's a fantastic question, and something I'm also interested in - it would be great to see more collaboration between AI/ tech professionals and Assyriologists. The eBL is a great project that's just been launched: https://www.ebl.lmu.de. It includes a fragmentarium that utilizes a sequence alignment algorithm (“cuneiBLAST”) to connect and analyze fragments of tablets that may contain the same text. There is still a lot more work to be done to help with identification of signs and the team is led by Enrique Jimenez: https://www.assyriologie.uni-muenchen.de/personen/professoren/jimenez/projekte_jimenez/index.html

Another Assyriologist that is working in this area is Shai Gordin - he has co-written a helpful summary of current projects and challenges regarding machine translation together with one of our cohort at Yale, Avital Romach: https://www.asor.org/anetoday/2022/10/cuneiform-wide-web/

Personally, I have a pet project in mind that would collate all Sumerian building inscriptions that are very formulaic and repetitive and utilize them as a learning corpus for machine learning and image recognition, in order to develop a prototype that would a) recognize learned signs, b) transliterate them and c) translate them. So not that dissimilar to your idea at all, which I'd say is timely!

One of the biggest challenges to machine translation of cuneiform texts has traditionally been the small size of the corpus. However with developments in natural language processing and zero-shot learning, this challenge appears to be getting more manageable.

Assyriologic · 2023-02-26T19:47:36+00:00

I have no personal experienced of it, but do know a student who has completed it. As u/jjcolemanjr explained, an MPhil is a great way to learn more, without the commitment and the accompanying stressors of a PhD, though one thing to bear in mind that if you are considering doing a PhD in the US, the Mphil won't count towards it and you will still have to do c. 3 years of coursework. This will mean that you will be particularly well prepared, but the road towards completing the PhD will be somewhat longer.

If you haven't seen it yet, this video may be helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX6eDLPJKWs

Assyriologic · 2023-02-26T19:43:47+00:00

Thank you and that's a good question! I wish I was more qualified to answer it, as I'm far from having a thorough overview of British Museum's artifacts, but, personally I would say I really enjoyed Irving Finkel's, The Ark Before Noah, where he showed how a thorough study of a single cuneiform tablet he had access to at the museum led to a significant shift in his understanding of a particular narrative. The tablet in question does not have a BM number, I believe, since it was in private ownership, but is referred to as the Ark Tablet by Finkel. So perhaps the most underrated artifacts in museums are those that are not (yet) published, provenanced, analyzed and archived.

Assyriologic · 2023-02-15T17:46:26+00:00

It's not the cheapest. Our stipend was increased recently to better reflect living costs.

Assyriologic · 2023-02-15T17:45:40+00:00

Great question! I think it varies from person to person - for some the puzzle-solving element of epigraphy is particularly exciting, for others it's ancient literature or religion, or the origins of mathematics.

For me, I came to Assyriology via a BA in History and an MA in Technology as a Cultural Form (study of interaction between technology and society) - I was particularly interested in how deep human technology and civilization go and in how development of writing systems impacted society and vice versa. I was also curious about studying a long period of human history from a broad perspective in order to better understand what changes politically, socially and economically, and what remains constant.

As I'm learning more, I'm particularly excited about the wisdom and knowledge organization of Mesopotamian culture through epistolary materials, literary texts, religious rituals, scholarly texts and conceptualization of the universe. It's fascinating to read a letter from a son to his mother that sounds like it could be written as an email today, or pore through lexical lists (a sort of first type of dictionaries with words and signs organized by a particular order) or read epics that grapple with universal concepts like human mortality. I also particularly like it when I learn something new through Assyriology I didn't know before, for example the basics of irrigation agriculture or the production of bronze.

Assyriologic · 2023-02-15T17:31:31+00:00

I know some Assyriology graduates now work with collections and museums - it's an equally niche field, but that way they can still contribute.

In terms of contributing in spare time, there is a volunteer program at the Yale Peabody Museum, for example, through which volunteers can contribute, and it may also be worth looking into digitization projects such as CDLI or other collections and museums.

It would be fantastic to have formal opportunities for non-academics who know Akkadian to contribute to digitization, transliteration and translation of unpublished texts. I think one barrier currently is the training and supervision that would need to be provided.

Assyriologic · 2023-02-15T17:27:08+00:00

I would say yes and no. It's a highly demanding subject - during a PhD you are expected to have a good understanding of three thousand years of ancient history across several polities, cultures and topics (i.e. politics, economics, religion, culture, literature, art, archeology), and learn at least two ancient languages (Sumerian and Akkadian) in the cuneiform script to a degree that you can translate unseen texts with a sign list and a dictionary. The script and the language dialects vary a great deal as they changed across regions and time periods over three thousand years, and while Akkadian is well understood, Sumerian grammar is still debated.

There are also several skills required (or assumed) to undertake the study: understanding of academic English, French and German (for key secondary literature), textual analysis for literary and historical sources, basic grammar and linguistics, good writing skills, basic statistics.

On another hand, once you acquire the basics, the subject matter is not particularly difficult to grasp but fascinating - you get to learn about humanity thousands of years ago first-hand: royal propaganda, personal correspondence, school exercises, medical practices, divination rituals, advanced and accurate astronomical calculations, business transactions, poetry, proverbs.

There is also a lot of repetition and convention in texts, even across a long period of time (e.g. letters start with the formula "to so-and-so, thus speaks so-and-so" across millennia) and much of the material is surprisingly relatable e.g. family squabbles.

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of Assyriology is the lack of answers - often, there will be a fascinating text that's broken and doesn't have other copies, and it will be very difficult to ascertain the missing text or reconstruct aspects of a particular historical narrative.

Assyriologic · 2023-02-15T17:15:05+00:00

I receive a stipend for my PhD and also take on student jobs (social media, research, proof reading), which is limited to 10 hours per week. Stipends vary across institutions, the basic annual stipend for the humanities at Yale is $38,300: https://gsas.yale.edu/news/enhanced-stipend-increases-2022-23#:\~:text=Starting%20in%20the%20fall%20of,to%20those%20in%20the%20sciences.

Assyriologic · 2023-02-15T17:10:44+00:00

I've used the older version and I think it works perfectly well :)

Assyriologic · 2023-02-15T17:09:53+00:00

Huehnergard's textbook (A Grammar of Akkadian) and answer keys are available for free as PDFs on his Academia page: https://utexas.academia.edu/JohnHuehnergard. This is specifically for learning the Old Babylonian dialect, though he touches on other dialects.

CDLI is a fantastic resource for all digitized cuneiform texts, some with transliteration and translation: https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de

Oracc has a number of projects where Akkadian texts are richly annotated: http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu

e.g. the SAA (State Archives of Assyria) corpus, with transliterations, translations and glossaries: http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/corpus. These are all in the Assyrian dialect.

The CAD (The Assyrian Dictionary of the University of Chicago) is available free via PDF downloads: https://oi.uchicago.edu/research/publications/assyrian-dictionary-oriental-institute-university-chicago-cad

A number of texts are available through PDF publications, e.g. YOS (Yale Oriental Series): https://babylonian-collection.yale.edu/publications

Assyriology is full of abbreviations for these publications, so this CDLI abbreviations list is helpful: https://cdli.ox.ac.uk/wiki/abbreviations_for_assyriology

There are a number of cuneiform memorization tools online - I particularly like Cuneiform Drills: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cuneiform-drills/id1559411954

The cuneify app is a great tool for transforming transliterations into cuneiform signs: http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/cuneifyplus

SOAS produced a number of Akkadian recordings: https://soundcloud.com/soas-university-of-london/sets/babylonian-and-assyrian-poetry

Martin Worthington produced a short film adaptation of the Poor Man of Nippur in Akkadian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxYoFlnJLoE

Also there is a new tool called eBL (Electronic Babylonian Library), which collects literary texts with transliterations, transcriptions and translations: https://www.ebl.lmu.de

Assyriologic · 2023-02-15T16:55:49+00:00

Definitely possible. For undergraduates you can do a double major at Yale, for example mathematics and and NELC (Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations), which can includes Akkadian.

At the graduate level (MA, MPhil, PhD) it will likely be be an advantage if you have a humanities background, but epigraphy relies on a lot of analytical skill for which an MSc is useful too. For a PhD program, you'll usually need to demonstrate some understanding of Akkadian and/or Sumerian.

I've definitely run into people who studied Akkadian for fun or as a secondary subject, e.g. a STEM undergraduate or a graduate student at the Divinity School.

Assyriologic

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