NES Faculty

Beate Pongratz-Leisten
Lecturer in Ancient Near Eastern Studies

email: pongratz@princeton.edu

Beate Pongratz-Leisten was first trained as a translator of French and Spanish at the École Supérieure des Interprètes et des Traducteurs, Paris, and the University of Mainz where she earned her MA degree with a thesis on Camus’ philosophy of the Pensée de Midi. In 1983 she embarked on Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Egyptology, and Religious Studies at Tübingen University and spent one semester at Harvard University as part of her doctoral degree.
Her MA thesis resulted from an archaeological survey at Uruk/Warka in Iraq and was published in Baghdader Mitteilungen 19 (1988). In 1993 she finished her Ph.D thesis on the cultic topography and ideological program of the New Year procession in Babylonia and Assyria. Her second thesis (habilitation), submitted in 1997, was dedicated to divinatory techniques under the aspect of “knowledge of rulership” and to the question of how ancient scholarship and kingship cooperated to create the image of the king’s constant communication with the gods.

Between 1989 and 1999 she served as an assistant professor at Tübingen University teaching Sumerian and Akkadian language courses as well as seminars on the political and cultural-religious history of Mesopotamia. As a member of the Assur Project organized by the Vorderasiatische Abteilung of the Pergamon-Museum, Berlin, and the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, she worked on bilingual lexical texts from the city of Assur. In 2000 she was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to pursue her research on the concept of the sacred in the ancient Near East.

After her move to the US in 2000 she taught at Bryn Mawr, Yale, University of Pennsylvania and the Princeton Theological Seminary. She spent the academic year 2003/04 at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University where she started writing her book on Religions in Mesopotamia and her research on “From the Image to the Book: Mediality and Textual Communities in the Ancient Near East.”
Since 2004 she taught courses on the political, cultural and religious history of the Ancient Near East at Princeton University, concurrently teaching language courses (Akkadian, Introduction and Advanced) at the Princeton Theological Seminary and the University of Pennsylvania.

Pongratz-Leisten is also member of doctoral committees supervising dissertations at University of Pennsylvania and Drew University in Ancient Near Eastern Studies and Hebrew Bible Studies.

Publications:

- Ina ulmi irub. Die kulttopographische und ideologische Programmatik der akitu-Prozession in Babylonian und Assyrien im 1. Jahrtausend v. Chr. (Mainz, 1994)
- Herrschaftswissen in Mesopotamien. Formen der Kommunikation zwischen Gott und König im 2. und 1. Jahrtausend v. Chr. (Helsinki, 1999)
- Together with Hartmut Kühne and Paolo Xella, Ana ?adî Labn?ni l allik. Beiträge zu altorientalischen und mittelmeerischen Kulturen. Festschrift für Wolfgang R?llig, AOAT 247 (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1997)

Numerous articles have been dedicated to aspects of religion and culture in the ancient Near East the most recent among them

- “Sacred Marriage” and the Transfer of Divine Knowledge: Alliances between the Gods and the King in Ancient Mesopotamia,” in M. Nissinen/ R. Uro (eds.), Sacred Marriages in the Biblical World, in press
- “Killing and Human Self-Sacrifice in the Ancient Near East” in A. Lange (ed.), Human Self-Sacrifice, in press
- “‘God’s Writing’: The Legal Aspect of the Written Divine Word,” in A. Lange/R. Styers (eds.), I Am No Prophet, in preparation
- “From the Image to the Book: Mediality and Textual Communities in the Ancient Near East,” in preparation

Projects
• Book on Religions in Mesopotamia. German version to be published in the series Religionen der Menschheit (Kohlhammer: Stuttgart)
• Edition of the Literature of the Ancient Near East for Kindler’s Lexikon der Weltliteratur
• Co-editing of a Canon Anthology of the Ancient Near East.

Research Interests
• Translating religions and cultures
• Intercultural contact between Mesopotamia and the Levant and the interface between polytheism and monotheism
• Scribal traditions and scribal communities in the Ancient Near East
• Intertextuality and the question of text categories in Ancient Near Eastern literature