Jonathan Taylor

Assistant Keeper, Cuneiform collections

Mesopotamia

Department: Middle East

Telephone: +44 (0)20 7323 8382
Email: jjtaylor @ thebritishmuseum.ac.uk

Jon is a curator responsible for the Museum’s outstanding collection of cuneiform texts from the ancient near east. He has a particular interest in education and literacy in the near east.

Prior to his appointment in January 2006, Jon was a Research Fellow on the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, University of Oxford www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/ and then Leverhulme Research Fellow on the Cuneiform Digital Palaeography Project, University of Birmingham www.cdp.bham.ac.uk.

Current British Museum projects

• The Ashurbanipal Library Project: a research collaboration with the University of Mosul, Iraq. Now also in collaboration with an international team co-ordinated at UCLA, USA.
• Umma project: an international research collaboration centred on the administrative archives of the ancient city of Umma. Designed to coincide with the study of texts from recent Iraqi excavations at this site.

 

Previous British Museum projects

Babylon: Myth and Reality exhibition

External fellowships/ honorary positions/ membership of professional bodies

• Chair of Publications Committee, British Institute for the Study of Iraq - www.britac.ac.uk/institutes/iraq/
• Member of Steering Committee, British Association for Near Eastern Archaeology - http://www.banea.org/
• Committee member, London Centre for the Ancient Near East - http://www.soas.ac.uk/nme/ane/lcane/
• Board member of the International Association for Assyriology - www.let.leidenuniv.nl/iaa/index.html
• Project associate, Cuneiform Digital Palaeography project, University of Birmingham - www.cdp.bham.ac.uk/index.htm
• Project associate, Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts, University of California, Berkeley - http://cuneiform.ucla.edu/dcclt/

Publications

Most recent publications

J. Taylor, Review of J.-J. Glassner, The Invention of Cuneiform, Writing in Sumer, in Journal of Semitic Studies 54 (2009) pp. 254–255

J. Taylor, Review of The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago: Volume 12 P, in Journal of Semitic Studies 53 (2008) pp. 331–335

contributions to the exhibition catalogues: Akhénaton et Néfertiti: soleils et ombres des pharaons; Babylon: Myth and Reality; Babylon: Wahrheit; Babylone

J. Taylor, 'Lexicographical Study of the Already Ancient in Antiquity', in R. Biggs, J. Myers, M. Roth (eds.) Proceedings of the Fifty First Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Held at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, July 18-22, 2005 (Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization 62. Chicago, Ill.: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2008)

J. Taylor, 'Babylonian Lists of Words and Signs', in G. Leick (ed.) Babylonian World (New York; London, Routledge, 2007)

J. Taylor, '"A quantitative analysis of the Sumerian proverb collections', in J. Ebeling and G. Cunningham (eds.), Analysing Literary Sumerian: corpus-based approaches (London: Equinox, 2007) pp. 273–315

J. Taylor, “The Sumerian Proverb Collections”, Revue d’assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale, 99 (2005) pp.13-38

J. Taylor, “OB Lu2-azlag2” (2006), "MB Lu", "Lu Long 01-05", and "Lu Short 01-02" (all 2007), Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts (www.cuneiform.ucla.edu/dcclt,)