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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 26/09/2026

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

When Kassite burned, it was the only thing I was able to bring with me.

Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 12/09/2026

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

Middle Assyrian Texts, Seals, and Seal Impressions (2025)

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 05/09/2026

*screams in bronze age legal history*

The history of "rights" goes back to at least ancient Greece. This is what I am referring to Emily is a milquetoast lib.

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 27/08/2026

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

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 22/07/2026

Not quite Mesopotamia but still brilliantly Sam & Julia

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 10/07/2026

Kickstarter starts August 22, but you can sign up to be notified when the time comes: www.kickstarter.com/projects/ari...

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 08/07/2026

Huge surprise in today's map tap: The Sumerian Game!!!!

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 11/06/2026

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.

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 11/06/2026

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.

Map of Iraq during the Old Babylonian Period (2003-1595 BCE).

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 11/06/2026

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)
A DISSERTATION PRESENTED
BY
ANDREW ALBERTO NICOLAS DELOUCAS
TO
THE DEPARTMENT OF NEAR EASTERN LANGUAGES AND CIVILIZATIONS
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
IN THE SUBJECT OF
ASSYRIOLOGY
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
APRIL 2026

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 07/06/2026

Another anniversary in the books, another visit to dog chapel in Vermont ❤️🐕🐾

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 28/05/2026

Very grateful for my very close seats to commencement speaker Dr. Conan O'Brien

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 13/05/2026

Went to check if my dissertation material was on ProQuest (not yet) and was met instead with a Stone Cold Stunner: my kindergarten class had been photographed for the Winston-Salem Journal.

Searching "andrew deloucas" on ProQuest, oldest first.

Hard Lessons: Schools find integration fails to demolish inequities, attitudes. By Kristin Scheve and Susan Gilmor. Winston-Salem Journal. February 22, 1998.

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 03/05/2026

Finishing off the week with Adams and Beethoven

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 01/05/2026

If Table of Gods isn’t already on your radar, take this moment to see what Arim Hawsho has been crafting over the last six years. Having the chance to work with him to on the project’s textual and historical grounding has been a real honor: www.tableofgods.com

Barley Porridge with Apples, Dates, and Bacon recipe, with an image of the meal.

Sumerian Lunch introduction and notes on the recipe.

A debossing die sample pressed into a clay-colored cover.

"To build out the bibliography of Table of Gods and add a final fact-checking pass, I’ve enlisted the help of Dr. Andrew Deloucas from Harvard University.

Deloucas is an Assyriologist who also helped me with the cuneiform signs for the cover (more on that below). We’ve set a deadline to complete the bibliography by the end of May."

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 28/04/2026

We did it, y'all: happy doctoring 😭

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 27/04/2026

All right now we got the Texans in here

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 26/04/2026

Preparing for my defense by seeing Lamb of God

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 24/04/2026

Egyptian leek apparently! I'd love to eat it one day

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 24/04/2026

Surely you're right, though we have a load of different alliums used in these recipes. Shallots, leeks, garlic, onions (oh my!). A similar stew recipe:

Stew of lamb. Meat is used. You prepare water. You add fat. Fine-grained salt, dried barley cakes, onion, Persian shallot, and milk you add. [You crush] (and add) leek and garlic.

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 24/04/2026

We're asking because this Mesopotamian stew asks for garlic and onion in equal measure 🥴 "Meat stew: meat is set up. You prepare the broth. You add fat. Grate in equal parts onion and garlic. Garnish with kurrat."

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 18/04/2026

🎉🍾 Congratulations to Dr. Julia Puglisi, newly minted Egyptologist and proud scribe of a monumental dissertation on the landscape archaeology of the Central Field of Giza! 🍾🎉🎆

Some Assyriologists and Dr. Julia Puglisi

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 10/04/2026

I was particularly happy to see how her work tackled archival analysis: there aren't enough large scale studies out there and there's a lot of work to be done for cuneiform studies in this way. Give it a read! Share it around!

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 10/04/2026

We think that they were used as tags for scrolls, that a string was pulled through the docket and attached to rolled up leather, possibly parchment. As far as I know, no evidence of the scrolls exist outside of visual art examples, such as here:

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 10/04/2026

I was struck by some of the material brought into the study, I hadn't known much about cuneiform dockets, these triangular objects with sometimes cuneiform, sometimes Aramaic inscribed upon them:

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 09/04/2026

Today, this year's penultimate meeting of HAANES at Harvard: @repekka.bsky.social giving her talk, "Keeping an Archive in 7th c. Assyria during the Alphabetic Turn".

Celine Debourse, Repekka Uotila, and Andrew Danielson

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 07/04/2026

This was a literary work, one of the earliest examples of the “Mirror for Princes” genre, whose best‑known modern representative is Machiavelli’s The Prince. Interestingly, a copy was found in the Governor's Mansion at Nippur during a tense period between Babylon and Assyria in the 8th century BCE.

Images of the tablets found in situ from OIP 114 (Cole 1996).

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 07/04/2026

The first cuneiform text found after George Smith's decipherment of the Epic of Gilgamesh's Flood Tablet in 1872 was a literary text called šarru ana dīni lā iqūl, or 'The King Does Not Regard the Law'. 'The King Does Not Regard the Law' concerns rulers who act out in a state's self-interest:

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 28/03/2026

We have a manuscript, we have a database 3 days remain

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 22/03/2026

In line with discussion about the job market, the latest majors being closed at Syracuse University:

Nine majors "sunsetting":
Classical civilization, Classics (Greek and Latin), Digital Humanities, Fine arts, German, Latino-Latin American studies, Middle Eastern studies, Modern Jewish studies, Russian

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 04/03/2026

In the process of cleaning up a footnote on Persian Gulf maritime travel, I ran into the claim that "Ea-nasir went on to travel to India," citing 70 year old material that doesn't even say this. Why do historians (derogatory) do this?

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 24/02/2026

Not the best balk of the neighborhood, but decent

A lot of snow. A shadowed figure walks away from a lit street. Parked cars are peppered with snow. The snow banks are thick, compacted with weeks' worth of snow and an additional twelve inches added on top. A small dog hardly is able to look above them.

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 21/02/2026

Serendipitous Mesopotamia meets cheese shop

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 09/02/2026

On the edge of Bluesky trying to carve out a little piece of the Internet for Mesopotamian studies at the nexus between Archaeology, History, and Classics 🥹

My bluesky handle is split between Classical Studies, Archaeology, and (British) Historians.

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 03/02/2026

In 1739 BCE, Samsu-iluna lost most of the region of southern Iraq (then called Yamutbalum) after an unsuccessful attempt to reign in cities like Ur, Larsa, and Uruk. At Nippur, those revolts weren't so visible. Instead, the city underwent a housing market collapse.

Number of texts at Nippur associated by genre (y-axis) by date (x-axis). From 1740-1735, there is a massive spike in property sales.

Standard deviation of Nippur house and land sales, with a tight cluster around 1739/38 BCE, with majority sales lower than -50% deviation.

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Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com · 03/02/2026

Five years later (1734-3 BCE), Ipqu-Enlil exchanges a room with Enlil-galzu, the last owner of his father's estate, and sells off his portion of the house to Enlil-nišu and Etel-pi-Ištar, the sons of Imgur-Ninurta (picture 3). The two brothers divvy their property into two households (picture 4).

Enlil-galzu owns rooms 155, 152a, and 157. The sons of Imgur-Ninurta own 173, 178, 180, 185, 186, and 187. Ipqu-Enlil owns 179a and b. Rooms 157 and 179 had been exchanged between Enlil-Galzu and Ipqu-Enlil, whereas the sons of Imgur-Ninurta purchased their rooms.

What remains of House I: two partitioned houses, half owned by the neighbor's son.

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