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Project Collaborator

Christopher Woods

Professor of Assyriology and Sumerology; Avalon Professor in the Humanities; Williams Director, Penn Museum University of Pennsylvania

Biography

Research Interests:
Sumerian writing and language; linguistics; origins and development of writing and writing systems; early Mesopotamian history, state formation, socio-political development, religion, literature, mathematics, and administration.

To learn more about his work, please visit his faculty page.

Featured Project

Projects

Signs of Writing: The Cultural, Social, and Linguistic Contexts of the World’s First Writing Systems

Signs of Writing: The Cultural, Social, and Linguistic Contexts of the World’s First Writing Systems

These scholars adopted a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective to study the contexts and structural properties of the world’s first writing systems.
Since the University’s inception, UChicago faculty have been pioneers in the study of the ancient world’s literary heritage, including the founding of modern scientific study of writing systems. Signs of Writing was a three-year research project designed to investigate, from a comparative and ...