Céline Debourse

Céline Debourse is an Assyriologist specializing in the languages, history, and religion of Babylonia during the first millennium BCE, with a focus on the Persian, Hellenistic, and Parthian periods (539 BCE–80 CE). This is the often-neglected final era of cuneiform culture, when traditional kingship was replaced by foreign imperial rule. Her work thus challenges conventional disciplinary boundaries by redefining the temporal scope of Assyriological inquiry. Furthermore, her research bridges Assyriology with other fields such as Classics, Hebrew Bible, and Late Antiquity, demonstrating the relevance of cuneiform culture beyond its immediate historical context. Integrating traditional philological methods with innovative historical analysis, she contributes to a more nuanced and interconnected view of the ancient world, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration. With this aim of shifting disciplinary boundaries and building interdisciplinary bridges, she is developing three distinct but overlapping areas of research, namely ritual and ritual textualization, Late Babylonian Priestly Literature, and the transformation (or “end”) of cuneiform culture.

In her first book, Of Priests and Kings: The Babylonian New Year Festival in the Last Age of Cuneiform Culture (Brill, 2022), she studies cuneiform priestly writings created under Persian, Hellenistic, and Parthian rule. She shows how this Late Babylonian Priestly Literature served to strengthen group-internal bonds and foster a strong priestly identity in a time of foreign domination. Debourse’s work has also focused on the socio-economic aspects of Babylonian temple households post-484 BCE, challenging long-standing assumptions of cultic continuity and shedding new light on the question of the impact of foreign rule on a former “hegemonic” religious system. Her work on the final age of cuneiform culture further ventures into the first centuries of the common era, studying the transformation of the culture beyond the last cuneiform tablet.

She is currently working on her next book project in which she analyses processes of ritual textualization in cuneiform tradition. In this study, she puts the texts at the forefront of investigation, with particular attention to how they exerted agency by reflecting, responding to, and transforming their historical context. This agency of the text relates strongly to historical and religious change, and gained in power and authority towards the end of cuneiform culture.

Debourse is a member of the board of the International Association for Assyriology (IAA), and she chairs the IAA Dissertation Prize committee.