Wang Xianhua is professor of ancient world history and director of the Institute of Afrasian History and Philology at the School of History & Culture, Sichuan University, China. He holds an MA in Hebrew Bible from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a PhD in Assyriology from the University of Cambridge, UK. His PhD thesis is published as The Metamorphosis of Enlil in Early Mesopotamia by Ugarit-Verlag in Münster in the series Alter Orient und Altes Testament. Besides articles focused on the political and religious history of early Mesopotamia (ca. 3500-2000 BCE), he has published studies on the Hebrew Bible, Chinese classics, and social scientific approaches to world history. He is currently the chief investigator of the research projects The Sargonic Transformation of Sumerian Polytheism funded by the Chinese National Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation, and The Central Administration of the Sargonic Empire funded by the Chinese Ministry of Education. He has been a DAAD visiting student to Jena University in Germany in 2005, a Visiting Professor to Sun Yat-sen University in 2012, and a visiting scholar to the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University in 2014. As a 2015-2016 Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow, he worked with the project Signs of Writing: The Cultural, Social, and Linguistic Contexts of the Worlds First Writing Systems headed by Professors Edward Louis Shaughnessy and Christopher Woods.