Professor Matthew Rutz
Brown University
Assistant Professor of Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies, Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies
faculty website
Research interests
Matthew Rutz works in the field of Assyriology, the interdisciplinary study of texts written in the cuneiform ("wedge-shaped") writing system from ancient Mesopotamia, traditionally the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (present-day Iraq, Syria, and Turkey). He specializes in the languages and cultures of this region with an emphasis on Akkadian (Babylonian/Assyrian) and Sumerian documents from the latter half of the second millennium BCE, the social and political history of Late Bronze Age Syria, Babylonian literary and scholastic texts from the site of Nippur (Iraq), ancient Mesopotamian intellectual and religious history, and the study of ancient texts as archaeological objects.