Eleanor Robson

Eleanor Robson, (born 1969) is a British Assyriologist and academic. Quotes In the 1840s rival British and French teams began to uncover and document the remains of vast stone palaces near Mosul, now in northern Iraq but then part of the Ottoman Empire whose capital was Istanbul. The adventurers quickly identified the ruins they were digging as the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh, known to them through the stories of the Old Testament and Classical authors. Thus they claimed it as part of their own, European heritage, and were little interested in its place in Middle Eastern history and tradition per se. Thus unwittingly the tone was set for interpreting ancient Assyrian – and, later, Babylonian and Sumerian – remains. […] The finds represented the ‘cradle of civilization,’ mankind’s first tottering steps toward European sophistication. [And] they were potential witnesses to events described in the Old Testament, appearing at a crucial juncture in Western European intellectual history […]. (Robson 2007: 59). Robson, Eleanor. Mesopotamian Mathematics (Chapter 2) from The Mathematics of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, and Islam: A Sourcebook Edited by Victor J. Katz, Princeton University Press 2007. For many people, the attraction of Plimpton 322 has been exactly its status as a ‘first infantile step’ on the way to modern Western-style mathematics. (Robson 2001). Robson, Eleanor. Neither Sherlock Holmes nor Babylon: A Reassessment of Plimpton 322, Historia Mathematica 28 (2001), 167–206 The Sulbasutras and the 'Pythagoras Theorem' External links Category:Living people Category:Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford Category:Academics of University College London Category:British historians of mathematics Category:Historians of the Middle East Category:British Assyriologists Category:Fellows of the British Academy Category:1969 births Category:Alumni of the University of Oxford