After the lectures, guests and staff gathered for a garden party in the institute’s villa at Arnimallee 10. The Arnimallee was named after Johann Friedrich Bernd von Arnim, who was Prussian Minister of State and Agriculture from 1906 to 1910. After the Second World War, the newly founded Freie Universität Berlin took over numerous villas, including house number 10, formerly owned by the Hecht family, whose villa next door at number 8 remains the only privately owned house in the center of the university district.
Garden of the insitute in Arnimallee 10
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The food was provided by Naya Jouly, a restaurant and caterer specializing in Levantine food right next to the university’s Rost- and Silberlaube. A research assistant at the institute worked tirelessly to ensure the right mix of drinks.
J. Cale Johnson with Florentina Badalanova-Geller (left), Professor at the TOPOI Cluster of Excellence until 2018, and Markham J. Geller (right), Professor for the History of Knowledge and PI of the ERC-Projects Babmed – Babylonian Medicine, until 2018, Freie Universität Berlin.
Karola Prutek (Technischen Universität Berlin) in conversation with Matteo Valleriani (Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte).
Mathieu Ossendrijver, PI of the ERC-Project ZODIAC – Ancient Astral Science in Transformation
Mathieu Ossendrijver is the Principal Investigator of the ZODIAC research project; he is a historian of ancient science, Assyriologist and astrophysicist. From 2013 to 2018 he taught as a professor for the history of science in antiquity at the Humboldt University in Berlin. His research interests include Babylonian astral science (astronomy, astrology) and mathematics, institutional, social and other contextual aspects of Babylonian science, and cross-cultural knowledge transformations between Babylonia and neighboring cultures such as those of Egypt and the Greco-Roman world.
J. Cale Johnson, head of the Institute for the History of Knowlege in the Ancient World
In 2020, J. Cale Johnson took up the professorship for Ancient History of Knowledge at the Free University of Berlin. He studied Assyriology, comparative Semitic languages, linguistics and linguistic anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Kyoto University. He had also conducted research in Berlin over several previous stays, at the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies, the TOPOI Cluster of Excellence and the Collaborative Research Center Episteme in Motion, and he was also deputy head of the ERC research project BabMed – Babylonian Medicine. Johnson taught Assyriology at the Universiteit Leiden and the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on proto-cuneiform and the origin of writing, Sumerian literature and grammar, and Babylonian medicine.
