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Stephanie Mary Dalley | |
|---|---|
| Born | Stephanie Mary Page March 1943 (age 82) |
| Title | Former Shillito Fellow in Assyriology Honorary Senior Fellow ofSomerville College Fellow of theSociety of Antiquaries |
| Spouse | Christopher Dalley |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge SOAS |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Assyriology Archaeology |
| Institutions | University of Oxford (Faculty of Oriental Studies,Somerville College) |
Stephanie Mary DalleyFSA (néePage; March 1943) is a BritishAssyriologist and scholar of theAncient Near East. Prior to her retirement, she was a teaching Fellow at theOriental Institute, Oxford. She is known for her publications of cuneiform texts and her investigation into theHanging Gardens of Babylon, and her proposal that it was situated inNineveh, and constructed duringSennacherib's rule.
As a schoolgirl, Stephanie Page worked as a volunteer on archaeological excavations atVerulamium,Cirencester, andBignor Villa. In 1962, she was invited byDavid Oates, a family friend, to an archaeological dig he was directing inNimrud, northern Iraq.[1] Here she was responsible for cleaning and conserving the discovered ivories.[2] Between 1962 and 1966 she studiedAssyriology atNewnham College, Cambridge, part ofCambridge University,[3] and followed it up with a PhD from theSchool of Oriental and African Studies, London.[1]
In the years 1966–67, Page was awarded a Fellowship by theBritish School of Archaeology in Iraq, and she worked at the excavation atTell al-Rimah asEpigrapher and registrar.[4] The tablets excavated atTell al-Rimah formed the subject of her PhD thesis and later for a book for general readership,Mari and Karana, two Old Babylonian Cities. In Iraq she met Christopher Dalley, now a Chartered Engineer, whom she later married. Then they had three children.
From 1979 to 2007, Dalley taughtAkkadian andSumerian at theOriental Institute, Oxford University, being appointed Shillito Fellow in Assyriology in 1988.[5] She is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow ofSomerville College, a member of Common Room atWolfson College, and a Fellow of theSociety of Antiquaries.
Dalley took part in archaeological excavations in theAegean,Iraq,Syria,Jordan andTurkey. She has published extensively, both technical editions of texts from excavations and national museums, and more general books. She has been involved in several television documentaries.
Dalley published her own translations of the main Babylonian myths:Atrahasis,Anzu,The Descent of Ishtar,Gilgamesh,The Epic of Creation,Erra and Ishum. Collected into one volume,[6] this work has made the Babylonian corpus accessible for the first time to the student of general mythology and it is widely used in university teaching.
In 1989 the Iraqi Department of Antiquities excavated one of a series of tombs in the ancient Palace ofNimrud.[7] A sarcophagus contained the skeletons of two women who had been buried with over 26 kg of gold objects, many of them inscribed. The inscriptions identified the women as queens from c 700 BC. Dalley showed that the nameAtaliya was ofHebrew origin. The name of the other queen,Yaba could also have been Hebrew, a word possibly meaningBeautiful and equating to another,Assyrian name formBanitu which is also found on the jewellery.She concluded that these women, probably mother and daughter as they had been buried together, were Judean princesses, probably relatives of KingHezekiah ofJerusalem, given in diplomatic marriage to the Assyrian Kings. This arrangement sheds a new light on the political relationships between Judah andAssyria at that time.The analysis also offers an explanation for an otherwise obscure passage in theOld Testament (II Kings 18.17–28 and alsoIsaiah 36.11–13). The besieging Assyrian commander, who would have been a close relative of the King, calls on the people ofJerusalem advising them to abandon their rebellion. "ThenRab-shakeh stood, and cried with a loud voice in the Jews' language, and said 'Hear ye the words of the great king, the King of Assyria'". He could speak in Hebrew because he had learned it at his mother's knee.
In several academic articles Dalley has traced the influence of Mesopotamian culture in theHebrew Old Testament, earlyGreekepics, and theArabian Nights. In particular she has studied the transmission of thestory of Gilgamesh across the cultures of the Near and Middle East and shown its persistence to theTale of Buluqiya in theArabian Nights, examining the evidence for Gilgamesh andEnkidu in the tale, as well as contrasting Akkadian and later Arabic stories. She has also noted the appearance of the name Gilgamesh in theBook of Enoch.[8]
One of theseven wonders of the ancient world, theHanging Gardens of Babylon were not found despite extensive archaeological excavations. Dalley has suggested, based on eighteen years of textual study, that the Garden was built not at Babylon underNebuchadnezzar, but inNineveh, the capital of the Assyrians, bySennacherib, around 2700 years ago. She deciphered Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform, and reinterpreted later Greek and Roman texts, and determined that a crucial seventh century BC inscription had been mistranslated. While none ofNebuchadnezzar's inscriptions ever mentioned any gardens, Dalley found texts bySennacherib about apalace he built and a garden alongside that he called awonder for all people. The texts also described a water screw, pre-datingArchimedes, using a new bronze-casting methodology that raised water all day, and related these to extensive aqueducts and canals that brought water from hills eighty kilometres away. Abas-relief from Nineveh and now in theBritish Museum depicts a palace and trees suspended on terraces, which Dalley used as further supporting evidence. Her research confirms the description of later Greek writers that the gardens were, in fact, terraces built up like an amphitheatre around a central pond. She compiled these conclusions into her bookThe Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced, published in 2013.[9][10]
Dalley published in 2009 an archive of some 470 newly found cuneiform texts[11] and deduced that they had originated in a southern Mesopotamian kingdom previously known only as theSea land which flourished c 1,500 BC. This fills a significant gap in modern historical knowledge. Her analysis of the texts has made it possible to identify tablets in other museums and collections as being from the Sealand dynasties.
In 1958 a gold beaker was discovered during excavations near the town of Naghadeh in North-western Iran. The beaker weighs 946g and is decorated with over 20 motifs which are repoussee and incised. Combining Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, Greek and biblical sources, Dalley showed that each motif could be related to an episode in theEpic of Gilgamesh.[12] As not all these episodes are contained in the "Standard Version", and as the style of decoration is not Mesopotamian, the beaker is evidence that the Epic of Gilgamesh had spread well beyond Mesopotamian civilisations. Hasanlu lay within the kingdom of Mannay, at some times a vassal state of the Assyrian Empire, and a beaker of such value may have been used only at state banquets at which a recital of the Epic was performed.This example of a gold vessel decorated with themes from myth may be a precursor of the imputed gold vessels which inspired similarly decorated Greek pottery of the 5th C BC.[13]
