A festschrift in honour of Jonathan Tubb, former Levant curator and Keeper of the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum. 44 contributions reflect Jonathan’s career and professional interests with a focus on the Jordan Valley and southern Levant, but also north Syria, Mesopotamia, and the protection of endangered cultural heritage.
To Aleppo Gone ... is a festschrift offered in honour of Jonathan Tubb, former Levant curator and Keeper of the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum. It includes 44 contributions invited from Jonathan’s friends and colleagues from across the world, with each short essay exploring a single idea and its wider ramifications. The assembled volume also reflects the development of Jonathan’s own career and professional interests, with a focus on the Jordan Valley and southern Levant, but also extending to north Syria, Mesopotamia, the protection of endangered cultural heritage, and the lives of early archaeological pioneers.
The editors are all former colleagues of Jonathan, and curators in the Department of the Middle East in the British Museum.
Irving Finkel is the senior curator responsible for the cuneiform tablet collection in the museum. He is a specialist in medical and magical works in Akkadian and particularly interested in esoteric inscriptions that concern ancient thought and speculation. He has been responsible for exhibitions inside and outside the museum, including Asian Games: The Art of Conquest (Asia Society New York, 2004) and Babylon: Myth and Reality (British Museum, 2008). He is the author of books for adults and children, including the bestselling The Ark before Noah, and is a world expert on ancient games and Founder of the Great Diary Project.
James Fraser is Curator for the Ancient Levant and Anatolia (supported by HENI) at the British Museum. In 2018, the Palestine Exploration Fund published his monograph Dolmens in the Levant in its Annual series, and this book was awarded the G. Ernest Wright Award for Best Archaeological Publication. James directs a British Museum excavation project in Jordan investigating a 4,500 year-old olive oil factory at Khirbet Um al-Ghozlan in the Wadi ar-Rayyan.
St John Simpson is responsible for the collections from Iran, Central Asia and Arabia, specialises in the archaeology of the Sasanian and early medieval periods, and has excavated extensively in the Middle East and Central Asia. He has curated three exhibitions at the museum, Queen of Sheba: Treasures from Ancient Yemen (2004), Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World (2011) and Scythians: Warriors of Ancient Siberia (2017/18), as well as the Rahim Irvani Gallery for Ancient Iran (2007). He was Jonathan’s deputy for the Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Training Scheme (2015–2021), and has museum-wide responsibility for repatriation of trafficked antiquities to their countries of origin.