Lucy Emanuel

I am a doctoral student in Archaeology (Assyriology) at St Catharine’s college, Cambridge, supervised by Dr Jonathan Tenney.
I completed my MPhil in Assyriology at Cambridge in 2024 and am grateful to have been awarded the Cambridge Masters and Selwyn Borthwick Studentship to fund my MPhil studies. I received the Archaeology Department’s Achievement in Assyriology Prize after earning a distinction for my final MPhil result.
For my PhD project I am continuing the research into Mesopotamian social history that I began during the MPhil, focusing on the issue of justice in Babylonia (modern-day Iraq) during the Kassite Period (c.1595-1155 BCE).
My work examines different cuneiform textual sources to investigate whether people from different strata of society were treated equally by the law, and by representatives of justice, during the Kassite Period. Royal lapidary inscriptions, such as records of the king’s adjudications, provide more evidence for justice among the élite. Clay tablets from administrative archives, which include contracts and court documents, provide the evidence for ordinary people and their experiences of justice. The best source of archival evidence for Kassite justice is the city of Nippur (modern-day Nuffar, Iraq), where thousands of Kassite-era tablets were excavated at the end of the nineteenth century. These tablets promise to give striking insights into daily life in the Middle East over three thousand years ago.
My PhD research is generously supported by an OOC AHRC DTP Studentship with Vice Chancellor’s award.