Eduba London Conference 2026

Order Out of Chaos: Classification and Categories in the ANE

8th-10th July, B05 LT, Chadwick Building, UCL

The first annual conference of the Eduba London project explored the themes of classification and categorisation in the ancient Near East, both as an ancient intellectual practice and as a modern scholarly tool. Across the ancient Near East, people used systems of classification to impose structure on and make sense of the world around them. At the same time, modern scholarship relies on its own categorical frameworks to organise, analyse, and interpret ancient evidence. This conference explores

Participants were invited to reflect on how ancient Near Eastern cultures classified and ordered reality, and to critically examine the categories we use today to study them. By comparing ancient epistemologies with modern analytical frameworks, the conference aimed to open new methodological and theoretical perspectives on ancient Near Eastern sources.

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Conference Programme

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Keynote Speakers

George Heath-Whyte

Knowing the Gods: Mesopotamian Divine Names and Epithets as Category Labels

As ancient scholars sought to make sense of the world, they were faced with no greater conundrum than the nature of the divine. How could such an unknowable, incomprehensible realm be compressed into the neat structures that the scholarly craft depended on? Based on insights from Cognitive Linguistics and the Cognitive Science of Religion, I will explore in this lecture the variety of ways in which names and epithets were used in ancient Assyria and Babylonia to classify and categorise the gods, as ancient people attempted to bring order out of divine chaos.

Bio:

George Heath-Whyte is an Assyriologist whose research focuses on the social and religious history of ancient Assyria and Babylonia. He is currently a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford, where he is writing about Mesopotamian conceptualisations of deity.

Annick Payne

Classified Information: How Ancient Scribes organized their World

This paper offers an overview of research into Anatolian Hieroglyphic classifiers within the context of comparative insight from other writing systems. Beginning with the general structure of the system, it traces the organization of semantic and phonetic classifiers and their historical development across the attested corpus. The diversity of classifier-host relationships will be examined as a window onto the full scope and creativity of system, with particular attention to the role of iconicity in shaping and motivating classifier use. The paper will also present modern digital solutions, showing how computational tools and digital corpora are opening new possibilities for the collection, analysis and visualization of classifier data. Bringing these threads together, the paper asks what the study of classifiers can ultimately tell us about the cognitive and cultural world of the ancient scribes who used them: how they categorized, organized and made sense of their world in writing.

References: Hieroglyphic Luwian. An Introduction with Original Texts, Harrassowitz 2004; 2010; 2014; 2026.

Iron Age Hieroglyphic Luwian Texts in Translation, SBL 2012.Schrift und Schriftlichkeit. Die anatolische Hieroglyphenschrift, Harrassowitz 2015.

Bio: Annick Payne is an associate professor of Anatolian Studies at Ca' Foscari University, Venice. She is the PI of the ERC project "Communication in Ancient Anatolia". A particular research interest of hers is writing and cognition, especially the development and system of the Anatolian Hieroglyphic script.