April 30, 2026 (Thursday)

9:00: Welcome to ISAW and Materialities of Ancient Texts (David M. Ratzan, ISAW)

Ancient China

9:10: Inscribed Objects, Empire, and Everyday Life in Han China (Lillian Tseng, ISAW)

9:50: War and Writing in Pre-Imperial China: Inscribed Weapons in Archaeological Context (Maria Khayutina, LMU)

10:30: Coffee Break

Ancient Near East

11:00: Estimating textual abundance in antiquity: the case of the cuneiform extispicy omen corpus (Mary Frazer, LMU)

11:40: Writing on the Body: Inscriptions on the Early Dynastic Mesopotamian Statues (Yu Song, ISAW)

12:20: Between Material and Materiality: The Blau Stones in Historical-Epistemological Perspective (Beate Pongratz-Leisten, ISAW)

13:00: Lunch (for registered partcipants only)

Late Bronze and Archaic Eastern Mediterranean

14:00: Materiality of Writing in Post-Hittite Syro-Anatolia: A Quantitative Analysis of Monumental Inscribed Objects (Manolis Mavromatis, ISAW)

14:40: Re-materializing the Alphabet: Embodied and Material Entanglements in Phrygian Writing Practice(s) (Christina Stefanou, ISAW)

15:20: Inscribed Armor, Personhood, and the Materiality of Writing in Archaic Crete (Antonis Kotsonas, ISAW)

16:00: Coffee Break

Keynote Address

16:45: “Wedge-shaped, wooden, once-sealed: Is there a text in this class?” (Divya Kumar-Dumas, University of Maryland)

19:00: Dinner (for speakers only)