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After years of sharing the material, arguments, and effort it took to get it through defense, my dissertation is finally indexed in ProQuest, albeit under embargo! So, what does a dissertation on Bronze Age Mesopotamian cities and their economic history look like and what knowledge does it produce?

Elite Persistence in Old Babylonian Nippur & Ur (2026–1700 BCE) examines two cities in Southern Iraq at a time described as destabilized and violent. Rather than study them through the eyes of the state, I focus on decisions made by local households, through which a different history emerges.

Social power in the Middle Bronze Age was a collective, negotiable process. Although kings claimed de jure power, local organizations and households exercised de facto power through economic and legal institutions and the social networks embedded within them.

These observations are captured in newly treated case studies on the cities of Assur and Sippar. Despite geographic, economic, and cultural differences, elite households across Mesopotamia held complementary, though often locally specific, positions on state intervention into their institutions.

To identify this at Nippur and Ur, I developed a database of 13,000 attested persons and 2,500 archival tablets to study how local elites used local institutions to maintain power. With this database, I revise and reconstruct a dozen family lines connected to discrete archives and organizations.

This is some of the most pressing work for Old Babylonian studies, connecting our understanding of civic and economic processes to family archives excavated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This work matters because it explains not just what these processes were but who enacted them.