The Melammu Project

The Heritage of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East

The main purpose of the Melammu Project is to investigate the continuity, transformation, and diffusion of Mesopotamian and Ancient Near Eastern culture from the third millennium BCE through the ancient world until Islamic times and after. Additionally, the Project studies the comparison of Mesopotamian and Ancient Near Eastern culture to cultural aspects found elsewhere, both in contemporary and different time periods. Finally, the Project is also interested in how Mesopotamian and Ancient Near Eastern culture lives on in and has influenced the modern world.

The Melammu Project has two main activities: to organize Melammu Symposia (multi-session meetings spanning multiple days) and Workshops (smaller meetings consisting of one or two sessions), and to provide resources relevant to the project on its website. Melammu Symposia are held regularly and serve to promote interdisciplinary research and cross-cultural studies by providing a forum in which cultural continuity, diffusion, and transformation in the ancient world can be assessed systematically on a long-term basis. The emphasis is on continued interchange of ideas between specialists in different disciplines, with the goal of gradually but steadily increasing the number of participants and thus breaking down the walls separating the individual disciplines. Although each Symposium can focus on a different theme, since the primary purpose of the Symposia is to encourage interdisciplinary cooperation per se, papers and posters not necessarily related to a specific theme but contributing to the overall scope of the project are generally welcome at every meeting.

The on-line resources provided by the Melammu Project include a database, a bibliography, a PDF library, and links to websites relevant to the project's focus. The database aims to collect textual, art-historical, archaeological, ethnographic and linguistic evidence concerning the heritage of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East and to make it easily accessible on the Internet. All resources are open-ended, and everyone is invited to contribute new information through the website's submission forms.