Guest Lecture: Lamenting the destroyed city from Mesopotamia to Estonia

We are pleased to invite you to a guest lecture “Lamenting the destroyed city from Mesopotamia to Estonia” by Senior Scientist Sebastian Fink, to be held on December 10 at 14:00, Jakobi 2-110.

The guest lecture is held in the framework of the lecture course of Peeter Espak (Prof. Ass. of Centre for Oriental Studies) "Sumerian Myth and Literature HVKU.10.010" as an additional popular lecture both for students and the general interested public.

Prof. Sebastian Fink is Senior Scientist at the Institute of Ancient History and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Innsbruck. He studied Philosophy and Assyriology and defended his dissertation on “Benjamin Lee Whorf, the Sumerians and the Influence of Language on Thought” (published 2015) at the University of Innsbruck. He held positions at the University of Kassel and the University of Helsinki. He currently is the chair of the Melammu Project, a scholarly network fostering interdisciplinary cooperation in the study of antiquity and he is a member of the Austrian Cluster of Excellence Eurasian transformations. He has been teaching classes on Sumerian and Akkadian, the history of the Ancient Near East and various other subjects since 2011 in Innsbruck, Kassel, Helsinki and Salzburg. His main research interests are the intellectual history of ancient Mesopotamia.

He has published on various aspects of Mesopotamian cultures, some of his publications are:

Fink, Sebastian; Sazonov, Vladimir (2023): “Political Culture and Political Agency: From Gaugamela to Mosul”. In: Mölder, Holger; Voinea, Camelia Florela; Sazonov, Vladimir (eds.): Producing Cultural Change in Political Communities: The Impact of Populism and Extremism on the International Security Environment. Cham: Springer Nature (= Contributions to Political Science), 65-83.

Fink, Sebastian (2021): “The Collapse of Early Mesopotamian Empires – A Homemade Disaster?” In: Journal of Ancient Civilizations (JAC) 36/1, S. 1 – 31.

Fink, Sebastian (2020): “Criticizing the King in Ancient Mesopotamia: An Overview, in: Horst, Claudia” (ed.): Der Alte Orient und die Entstehung der Athenischen Demokratie. Wiesbaden (= Classica et Orientalia 21), 11-36.

Anthonioz, Stéphanie; Fink, Sebastian (2020): “Ce qu’un dieu n’est pas: les prémices de la théologie négative”. In: Revue de l’histoire des religions 2020/2, S. 179 – 193.

Fink, Sebastian; Parpola, Simo (2019): “The Hunter and the Asses: A Neo-Assyrian Paean Glorifying Shalmaneser III”, Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 109(2), 177-188.