An afternoon with Nancy Highcock

Dr Highcock is the Curator for Mesopotamia in the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum. She is an archaeologist and historian with a particular interest in ancient trade and merchant communities in Syro-Mesopotamia and Anatolia.

Her talks to us will be:

1. The Material Religion of Mesopotamian Merchants - Long-distance merchants were often on the move, living and working away from their mother cities and social networks. They brought their religious practices with them, creating new practices whilst maintaining ties to their traditions back home. This talk with focus on the material culture associated with mercantile religious practice, namely dedications and religious spaces. By examining how merchants materialized their religious beliefs , we can better understand how merchants created new, and maintained old, social bonds in communities spread across time and space.

2. Of Pins and Loomweights: Women’s Economic Agency in Assyria and Anatolia - In early second millennium Anatolia, women impressed their clothing pins into loom weights as well as other clay objects such as tablets. Through a study of these pins, loomweights, and textual sources that describe the importance of jewelry and textile production to women’s lives in the mixed Assyrian-Anatolian communities of this period, this paper will explore how ancient women navigated the complex social worlds in which they lived.