Dr Ben Dewar

Profile
I am an Assyriologist and historian of the cuneiform-writing cultures of ancient Mesopotamia with a particular interest in the intellectual, literary, and political history of the late 2nd and early 1st Millennia BC. I completed my PhD, on Representations of Rebellion in the Assyrian Royal Inscriptions, at the University of Birmingham before working as an Associate Lecturer in the Department of History at University College London from 2022 to 2024.
My research combines theory and approaches from the social sciences and literary criticism with close readings of cuneiform texts to investigate two main areas: the intersection of moral, religious, and political thought with conceptions of imaginative geography, history, and the built and natural environment in Mesopotamian historiography and literature, and the role of geography and history as ordering principles of cuneiform texts. I am also interested in narratological approaches to ancient texts. My published research has investigated these themes in relation to a variety of subjects, including the deaths of members of the Assyrian royal family, violence against the other in early Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions, and the nature of historical explanation in Babylonian chronicles. My research at the ICS is on the construction of historical knowledge in Mesopotamia. In particular, this research focuses on representations of the transmission of historical knowledge in cuneiform literature and the study of historical texts by ancient scholars in Assyria and Babylonia in the 1st millennium BC.