Announcing the Wright Lecture Series in Ancient Near Eastern Studies
The Classics and Archaeology program is delighted to announce the new Wright Lecture Series in Ancient Near Eastern Studies. The program has received a generous donation from Dr JJ Kim Wright (University of Melbourne alumnus) to support an annual visit and lecture by an international scholar. The programme will begin in November 2025, with Dr Céline Debourse (Harvard University) as the inaugural Wright Lecturer.
The inaugural Wright Lecture will be presented on Monday 3 November 2025 at 4:00pm. Dr Céline Debourse’s lecture is titled, “Babylon on the Cusp: Cuneiform Culture From Antiquity to Late Antiquity.”
Dr Céline Debourse is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She is a specialist in the scholarly and priestly culture of first-millennium BCE Mesopotamia, and an expert in the Akkadian language. In her lecture, she will present the city of Babylon in the twilight of cuneiform learning. Traditionally, the disappearance of the characteristic wedge-shaped writing of the ancient Near East has been seen as the end of Mesopotamian culture. Debourse recasts it as a transformation.
Dr Debourse’s first book, Of Priests and Kings: The Babylonian New Year Festival in the Last Age of Cuneiform Culture (Brill, 2022), re-examined the famous akītu-festival. This ritual has dominated understanding of Mesopotamian religion and politics, and scholars have long believed our most detailed textual accounts are late copies of a much older original. In a fresh analysis, based on a new edition of these texts, Debourse reveals they were composed by priests in the Hellenistic period, reimagining their own political role in a city under foreign domination.
The history of the city of Babylon has many endings: the Persian conquest in 539 BCE; Alexander’s Babylonian campaign in 331 BCE; the arrival of the Parthians in 141 BCE. The last recovered cuneiform tablet was written around 75 BCE. To most scholars, these last centuries of cuneiform culture are the slow decline of a great civilization and its eventual death. But did it truly disappear without trace in the subsequent cultures of the region? In this lecture, Dr Debourse will tell a different story—one that reimagines the end of cuneiform culture as a transformation. She will explore how cuneiform culture adapted, persisted, and remolded itself in new contexts, urging us to reconsider its end in an existence beyond the last tablet.
All University of Melbourne staff and students are warmly welcome to attend. You can register for the lecture here.
FANES Patron — Dr JJ Kim Wright
In 2025, Dr JJ Kim Wright kindly accepted an invitation to become the new Patron of the Friends of Ancient Near Eastern Studies (FANES), a Melbourne-based organisation for scholars of the cultures and languages of all areas of the Ancient Near East. Dr Wright succeeds Wallace Cameron, who sadly passed away in 2024.
Dr Wright completed his PhD in organic chemistry at the Australian National University in 1969. Following a successful career in the US, he returned to study Classics and Archaeology at the University of Melbourne. He is particularly interested in ancient languages, especially Akkadian – the lingua franca of the Bronze and Iron Age Near Eastern World.
Akkadian Language to be Offered from 2026
The Wright Lecture coincides with the revival of Akkadian language teaching at the University of Melbourne. After a decade-long hiatus, Akkadian 1 (ANCW10008) and Akkadian 2 (ANCW10009) will be taught in 2026 by Dr Tom Hercules Davies, who started as Lecturer in Classics and Archaeology last year.
Akkadian was the language of the Assyrians and Babylonians, and of high culture and international communication throughout the entire Ancient Middle Eastern world for a period of about 2500 years. Deciphered in the mid-19th century, it is preserved in clay tablets and monumental inscriptions excavated from Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Egypt, Cyprus, and the Levant. There are far more texts than scholars to read them: hundreds of thousands of Akkadian documents lie unpublished in museums all over the world, and millions more await archaeological discovery under the sands of modern-day Iraq and Syria.
The University of Melbourne first offered formal instruction in Akkadian in the 1960s (the word “Akkadian” first appears in the 1961 Arts Faculty Handbook). The reintroduction of the language in 2026 is prompted by student demand. Ancient languages are booming at the University of Melbourne: introductory Ancient Greek, Ancient Egyptian, and Latin have all seen significant increases in enrolment in the past five years.
Classics and Archaeology at Unimelb
The program in Classics and Archaeology is renowned for its comprehensive approach to the study of the ancient world. The University of Melbourne is the only Australasian university that offers Akkadian, and one of only a handful of universities in the world where undergraduate students can learn all four of the ancient languages necessary to study Aegean, Roman, Egyptian and Near Eastern civilisations as an interconnected world system. This multidisciplinary, multicultural approach to the ancient past is made possible by a long history of philanthropic support for teaching and research on the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East.
Ancient Near Eastern Studies (ANES)
The University of Melbourne is also home to the international refereed journal Ancient Near Eastern Studies. Established in 1959 and published by Peeters Press, ANES is the only Australian journal dedicated to the study of the ancient Near East. The journal is edited by A/Prof. Andrew Jamieson, and the editorial board include experts from Berlin, Jerusalem, Leiden, Liege, Michigan, Munich, New York, Rome, Sydney, and Tbilisi. The journal attracts papers from leading scholars worldwide.
Andrew Jamieson and Tom Hercules Davies
Feature image: L to R: A/Prof. Andrew Jamieson Troublemaker, Dr JJ Kim Wright FANES Patron, Dr Tom Hercules Davies FANES President in the Arts West Building Object-Based Learning labs. Photographer Tom Hercules Davies.