Faculty Research Fellow
Heather D. Baker (D.Phil. University of Oxford, 1999) is a historian of the ancient Near East. Her research interests include the social, economic, and political history of Assyria and Babylonia in the first millennium BCE. She is especially interested in integrating textual and archaeological data in the study of how the Babylonians lived. She has published extensively on Babylonian urbanism, including her article “The Later Phases of Southern Mesopotamian Urbanism: Babylonia in the Second and First Millennia BC” in Journal of Archaeological Research (2023). Her current SSHRC-funded project investigates the connection between inheritance and inequality in urban Babylonia.
Fellowship Research Project: Being a Neighbour in Urban Babylonia
Residential neighbourhoods were an important element of the Babylonian city, yet there is little consensus as to their character. Using cuneiform tablets from 1st millennium BCE Babylonia that record urban property transfers, this project analyses small-scale communities of property owners and their neighbours. It studies the interactions of people living in face-to-face communities, their family relationships, and their markers of identity (personal names, status, professions, official titles, and ethnic and geographical designations). This approach promises to shed new light on the social composition of urban neighbourhoods in Babylonia.