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Odette Boivin, Postdoctoral Researcher, Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies and Near Eastern Archaeology, University of Münster
Odette Boivin obtained her PhD in Assyriology at the University of Toronto in 2016 with a thesis on mid-second millennium Babylonian history. An adapted version of it was published as a monograph in 2018: "The First Dynasty of the Sealand in Mesopotamia." She pursued further research and taught as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto before taking on a two-year position as Visiting Assistant Professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, at New York University. She is now based at the University of Münster where she works on the project 'Governance in Babylon', funded by the European Research Council. In that project, she is editing and analyzing unpublished mid-first millennium archival texts from Babylon. Dr.Boivin's interests include several aspects of the political, social, and economic history of southern Mesopotamia in the 2nd and 1st millennia as well as Babylonian historiography. She has published a number of essays of these topics.
This lecture examines how a mid-first millennium Babylonian chronicle constructs a certain idea of the early history of the Babylonian core land. She gives special attention to spatial elements in the narrative. Based on an evaluation of anachronistic and heterotopic elements, and on the relation between the text and probable sources, the lecture proposes a reading key and discusses the chronicler's intention.