Baker, Heather D.

 

This profile was last modified on 2024-11-12 at 10:20:50

Biography and Research

As an Assyriologist who has also trained in archaeology and gained considerable experience of Near Eastern excavation, her primary interest is in combining textual information and material culture in the study of Mesopotamian society and economy. She apply this approach to the study of the Babylonian city and to investigating house and household. She was PI of an international project, Machine Translation and Automated Analysis of Cuneiform Languages (MTAAC), funded by SSHRC through the Trans-Atlantic Platform Digging into Data Challenge.

Research Interests
Her work focuses on the social, political and economic history and material culture of 1st millennium BC Mesopotamia, with a particular interest in Babylonian urbanism and the built environment, and in the Neo-Assyrian royal household. Her research and publications cover the following topics:

  • urbanism and the built environment
  • religious architecture
  • house and household
  • integration of textual and archaeological data
  • Hellenistic Babylonia (especially the city of Uruk)
  • the Assyrian royal palace and household
  • onomastics and naming practices
  • prosopography
  • slavery
  • society and economy
  • political history
  • cuneiform archives and archival practices

Employment

  • 2022—: Associate Professor in Ancient Near Eastern History, Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto
  • 2019—2022: Assistant Professor in Ancient Near Eastern History, Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto
  • 2014—2019: Assistant Professor in Ancient Near Eastern History, Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto
  • 2009—2014: Senior Postdoc and PI of project “Royal Institutional Households in First Millennium BC Mesopotamia,” Institut fūr Orientalistik, University of Vienna
  • 2003—2009: Postdoc, START Project “The Economic History of Babylonia in the First Millennium BC,” Institut fūr Orientalistik, University of Vienna
  • 1999—2002: Research Associate, State Archives of Assyria Project, University of Helsinki; from July 1999, Editor-in-Charge of The Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire
  • 1993—1998: Editorial Assistant/IT Assistant (part-time), A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (a British Academy Major Research Project)
  • 1994—1995: Curator Grade G (part-time), Department of the Middle East, the British Museum
  • 1984—1989: Field Archaeologist employed on various excavation and post-excavation projects in England, Cyprus, Turkey, Jordan, and Iraq

Education

  • DPhil, Assyriology (University of Oxford)
  • MPhil, Cuneiform Studies (University of Oxford)
  • BA, Archaeology (University of Cambridge)

https://heatherdbaker.hcommons.org/

Publications

Baker, Heather D. 2004. The Archive of the Nappahu Family. Vol. 30. Archiv Für Orientforschung. Beiheft. Wien: Institut für Orientalistik der Universität Wien. [Nappahu (Baker2004Nappahu)]

Baker, Heather D. 2023. “The Assyrian Empire: A View from Within.” In The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East, Volume 4. The Age of Assyria, edited by Karen Radner, Nadine Moeller, and Daniel T. Potts, 257–351. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [OHANE 4, p. 257-351 (RN10880)]

Baker, Heather D. 2022. “Nabonidus.” In Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, edited by Constance M. Furey, Brian Matz, Steven L. McKenzie, Thomas Römer, Jens Schröter, Barry Dov Walfish, and Eric J. Ziolkowski, 20:525–26. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. [Furey et al. 2022, p. 525-526 (RN10883)]

Baker, Heather D. 2020. “Merodach-Baladan.” In Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, edited by Constance M. Furey, Brian Matz, Steven L. McKenzie, Thomas Römer, Jens Schröter, Barry Dov Walfish, and Eric J. Ziolkowski, 18:781–82. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. [Furey et al. 2020, p. 781-782 (RN10884)]

Baker, Heather D. 2023. “The Later Phases of Southern Mesopotamian Urbanism: Babylonia in the Second and First Millennia BC.” Journal of Archaeological Research 31: 147–207. [JAR 31, p. 147-207 (RN10963)]

Baker, Heather D. 2022. “Nabopolassar.” In Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, edited by Constance M. Furey, Brian Matz, Steven L. McKenzie, Thomas Römer, Jens Schröter, Barry Dov Walfish, and Eric J. Ziolkowski, 20:527–28. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. [Furey et al. 2022, p. 527-528 (RN11012)]

Baker, Heather D. 2019 (2022). “Reconstructing Ancient Babylon: Myth and Reality.” Journal of the Canadian Society for Mesopotamian Studies 14: 15–27. [JCSMS 14, p. 15-27 (RN11013)]

Baker, Heather D. in press. “Babylonian Archaeology.” In Handbook of the ‘Exile’: New Perspectives from Judaean and Babylonian Evidence, edited by Tero Alstola, J. M. Silverman, J. Stökl, Caroline Waerzeggers, and A.-M. Wetter. Ancient Near Eastern Monographs. Atlanta, GA: SBL Press. [ANEM XX, p. xx-xx (RN11014)]

Baker, Heather D. 2024. “Assyrian Names.” In Personal Names in Cuneiform Texts from Babylonia (c. 750-100 BCE): An Introduction, edited by Caroline Waerzeggers and Melanie M. Groß, 109–20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Personal Names in Cuneiform Texts, p. 109-120 (RN11015)]

Baker, Heather D. 2014. “Tiglat-Pileser III.” In , 14:21–24. Reallexikon Der Assyriologie Und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie 1–2. [RlA 14, p. 21-24 (RN2452)]


Page 1 of 10, showing 10 record(s) out of 91 total

Page 1 of 10, showing 10 record(s) out of 91 total

Associate at CDLI

Contributions

Ongoing

Dr. Baker regularly shares curated catalogue entries with the CDLI which greatly enrich the coverage for first millennium data. 

Dr. Baker is part of a chronology workgroup which informs how the CDLI will handle chronological data in the future.

2016-2020

Dr. Baker was Principal Investigator on the  Machine Translation and Automated Analysis of Cuneiform Languages (MTAAC) Project which has provided corrections to the Ur III corpus data, textual annotations for Ur III texts, and a large array of natural language processing tools and means of linking textual and catalogue data for cuneiform languages.

Created Type Description Role Status
2024-11-12 at 10:20:39 Other Entity Reformatted and edited version of bibliography of Heather Baker based on .bib-file supplied by Baker and Pagé-Perron Author approved
2021-03-09 at 00:00:00 Artifact 20210309 cdlistaff_baker Author approved
2020-12-08 at 00:00:00 Artifact Author approved
2018-08-09 at 00:00:00 Artifact 20180808_baker_page-perron Author approved
2018-08-09 at 00:00:00 Artifact 20180808 pagé-perron_baker Author approved
2017-10-02 at 00:00:00 Artifact 20171002 cdliadmin_baker Author approved

Total 6 record(s)

Cite this Author
CDLI contributors. 2024. “Baker, Heather D. - Authors.” Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. November 21, 2024. https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/authors/1093.
CDLI contributors. (2024, November 21). Baker, Heather D. - Authors. Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/authors/1093
CDLI contributors (2024) Baker, Heather D. - Authors, Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. Available at: https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/authors/1093 (Accessed: November 21, 2024).
@misc{CDLI2024Baker,
	note = {[Online; accessed 2024-11-21]},
	author = {{CDLI contributors}},
	year = {2024},
	month = {nov 21},
	title = {Baker, {Heather} {D}. - {Authors}},
	url = {https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/authors/1093},
	howpublished = {https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/authors/1093},
}


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PY  - 2024
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TI  - Baker, Heather D. - Authors
UR  - https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/authors/1093
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