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Gojko Barjamovic, Senior Lecturer on Assyriology, Harvard University
Gojko Barjamovic has taught Assyriology at Harvard since 2013. His research interests include institutional and civic order, wealth and inequality, literacy and knowledge production, trade and mobility, ethnicity and identity. His scholarly production is driven by integrative questions and characterized by extensive cross-disciplinary collaboration.
The talk engages the socially and chronologically dense archival material from the site of Kültepe in modern-day Turkey to showcase a historical approach that integrates close readings of private letters and commercial records with a bird’s-eye view of a Eurasian exchange system reflected in prosopography, studies of historical geography and trade volume, material culture studies, and the archaeological sciences. We follow the trader Zizizi (born c. 1895 BCE) who had her life turned upside down by the very connectedness upon which her society was predicated and who ended up seeking financial freedom and some semblance of gender parity in a foreign land. Through her eyes and those of her closest family, we unpack the history of her society from above and from below.