Speaker: Odette Boivin (University of Toronto) – focuses on archival, everyday Babylonian documents and historiographic sources.

Robert Koldewey and his team excavated in Babylon between 1899 and 1917, carrying out foundational work for our understanding of the city of Babylon and contributing to develop and establish archaeological standards in the early days of the discipline. As an Assyriologist, Dr. Odette Boivin had the opportunity to work on a few hundreds of cuneiform tablets from the Koldewey expedition and examine in detail the recording of their archaeological context (Project Governance in Babylon 2021-2026). Her lecture discusses the approach preconized by Koldewey’s team for retrieving, recording and handling written artefacts and the methods used they deployed. She presents also a few examples of how they were able to deduce information that was not recorded explicitly.