Working at Home in the Ancient Near East

Working at Home in the Ancient Near East brings together the papers and discussions from an international workshop organized within the framework of the 10th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East held in Vienna in April 2016. The volume examines the organization, scale, and the socio-economic role played by institutional and non-institutional households, as well as the social use of domestic spaces in Bronze Age Mesopotamia. The invited speakers – archaeologists, philologists, and historians specializing in ancient Mesopotamia – who approached these topics from different perspectives and by analyzing different datasets were encouraged to exchange their views and to discuss methodological concerns and common problems.

This volume includes seven archaeological- and philological-oriented essays focusing on specific sites and archives, from northern Mesopotamia to southern Babylonia. The contributions assembled in the present volume seek to bridge the gap between archaeological records and cuneiform sources, in order to provide a more accurate reconstruction of the Mesopotamian economies during the 3rd and 2nd millennium BC.