Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Wednesday, February 21, 2018 in Divinity School, Events, HART, Lectures, News, VRC.

Andrea Seri, professor of ancient history, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, will present a lecture entitled Tradition, Past and Present:The Appointment of King Nabonidus’ Daughter as an Entu-priestess on Wednesday, February 21, at 4:10 pm in the Divinity School Reading Room. On Thursday, February 22, Seri will lead a workshop on working with cuneiform tablets that will be held in the Divinity Library, Room 224.

The lecture focuses on one of the inscriptions of the last independent ruler of Babylonia, King Nabonidus (556-539 BC). The cuneiform manuscript, written on a clay cylinder, commemorates the appointment of Nabonidus’ daughter as an entu-priestess of the moon god in the ancient city of Ur. The inscription opens with an eclipse announcing the divine desire of a priestess and then explains the way in which the king, to comply with the divine request, reconstructed a ceremony that had not been practiced for centuries. By crisscrossing the information from textual analysis, archaeological, philological, and historical data, Seri shows how the writer resorted to the use of genuine ancient inscriptions and excavated antiques to intertwine present, past and tradition in order to compose his account of the religious ceremony.

Seri is visiting Vanderbilt in conjunction with the Cultures in Clay exhibit at the Divinity Library. The exhibit draws from two Vanderbilt collections: the Cuneiform Tablets Collection, donated by the family of James Stevenson in 1989, and the Arno Poebel Collection, acquired by the Divinity Library in 1968. Stevenson was a biblical scholar and Assyriologist who was a longtime faculty member at Vanderbilt. His tablets date from around 2000 BCE. Seri contributed her expertise toward identifying and translating the Stevenson tablets and has returned to conduct a workshop on reading the tablets and other parts of the research process for interested graduate students.

Both events are sponsored by the Program in Classical and Mediterranean Studies, Divinity School, and Divinity Library. For more nformation about either event, please contact Annalisa Azzoni, senior lecturer in Hebrew Bible, at 615.343.3972 or email annalisa.azzoni@vanderbilt.edu.