Andrew A.N. Deloucas

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?

tag yourself

Top-tier weird little guy on an incantation bowl from Nippur, Iraq, c 500 BCE, in the Penn Museum.

Why do Neo-Babylonian legal contracts refer to "iron oxen" used to plow fields? Did the Babylonians invent tractors? Not quite, apparently iron oxen are a legal clause which means that the borrower has to replace any ox that dies during the term of the lease. The oxen are therefore "immortal".

Serendipitous Mesopotamian Spotting: Kassite, as appropriated in Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave

Where did the sacred artifacts smuggled out of Nepal by Mary Slusser end up? One answer is... a flea market. I explain in this video.

3,900 years ago an Assyrian trader named Aššur-taklāku found himself in an unlucky situation during his travels: he was accused by local Anatolian rulers of taking orders from a rival city. After a 2-month imprisonment, a group of his colleagues met with the king and queen to vouch for his good name

It's Friday night, you are reviewing a new volume of Middle Assyrian texts and drinking a beer, your partner plays through Ocarina of Time in the background

Always a pleasure @zachrubin.bsky.social!

We keep discussing ”strategies” for teaching in the age of AI to avoid talking about resources. It’s so boring!! The strategy is invest $ to hire people, lower class size, support research-engaged learning & stop measuring the worth of disciplines in relation to # of enrollments and majors.

*screams in bronze age legal history*

A beginner’s hand: a small Old Babylonian tablet with simple exercises. This list containing sequences of three basic signs, each denoting syllables with alternating vowels (u-a-i), were part of a scribe’s early education as they became familiar with the shape and values of cuneiform signs.

Folks, it's time to call it: fund more Assyriology chairs if you want more Ea-nasir material

Others have commented @rajakorman.bsky.social has punned, but in case you missed @dael.bsky.social @bhgreeley.bsky.social @sarahebond.bsky.social I am here to tell you: THIS OP-ED is completely, totally uninformed. It's appalling the NYT published it. Short 🧵 www.nytimes.com/2026/08/22/o...

Table of Gods hit its Kickstarter goal of $1 million in just 18 hours - surely a sign that we need more Assyriology in the world!

Sarah's absolutely right. While I love and support modern debt remission programs, this guest article swings and misses on the parallels and lessons learned between ancient and modern economies.

Data point for the “cost of humanities research“ discourse:

Three days until Table of Gods launches! Relish in the world's first cuneiform book, filled with millennia of entertainment, creativity, history, and beautiful images. It's going to be talked about for a long, long time.

1 key useful discussion we should have (because historians in different eras/places don't talk to each other enough) is how distinct our datasets & archives are. Sorting through 80K Roman inscriptions for the word "consociata" is awesome! Folks in archives w/ many handwritten docs have diff issues.

Oooh boy. This is a great opportunity to talk about datasets and what goes into constructing a small one much less a "well structured historical dataset" in some fields. I'm a digital historian of Renaissance and Early Modern Italy and *none* of my material is digitized (1/13)

The reality is that this AI chatbot can only go so far as institutions have digitized and opened their archives up to be searched: it's frustrating to see AI get the headlines when it's underfunded and often politically targeted GLAMs that deserve the credit in these sorts of projects.

Here's a fun one: UIowa's Noah Jedlicka takes on a provenance study of the University's cuneiform collection. These were the first cuneiform objects I had seen before, great to read about their history! blog.lib.uiowa.edu/speccoll/202...

Like Loebs? Every fall semester, I like to remind people that while Perseus has many free Loebs sectioned up into book and chapter, if you want to download and read the public domain Loebs (277 of them) as PDFs or txt files, Duke U's very own Ryan Baumann created _Loebolus 📗📕_. ryanfb.xyz/loebolus/

Now that the secret is out, it's time for historians to start learning about CIDOC

New office!

Sorry Gilgamesh lovers, the right answer is ludlul bel nemeqi, directed by Robert Eggers

Moving is exhausting not only through the act of packing, but also from the gymnastics of finding suitable places to rest your filled boxes