Bruno Jacobs is Professor for Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Basel. His main interests are the archeology and history of the first millennium BCE, especially the Achaemenid Empire, interrelations of the Ancient Near East with the Mediterranean, the Parthian Empire, and Commagene.
Michael Jursa is Professor of Assyriology at the University of Vienna. Recent publications include Aspects of the Economic History of Babylonia in the First Millennium BC (2010) and, with Eckart Frahm, Neo‐Babylonian Letters and Contracts from the Eanna Archive (2011).
Oskar Kaelin is Near Eastern Archaeologist at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He is a researcher in a project editing historical sources on the Phoenicians, associate editor in the project “Iconography of Deities and Demons in the Ancient Near East” (Zurich/Fribourg), and co‐director of the excavation in Tall al‐Hamidiya, Syria.
Deniz Kaptan, Adjunct Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada Reno, is the author of The Daskyleion Bullae: Seal Images from the Western Achaemenid Empire (2002). She is preparing a publication about seals and seal use in Anatolia during the Achaemenid Empire period.
Florian S. Knauss received his PhD in Classical Archaeology at the Universität des Saarlandes in 1993. In 1994–2001 he was Assistant Professor in Münster, and from 2001 to 2011 Curator at the Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek München. Since 2011 he has been Director of these museums. He has been concerned with Achaemenid remains in the Caucasus region since 1994, for example excavations in Georgia (1994–2000) and Azerbaijan (2006–2019).
Reinhard G. Kratz, born in 1957, has been Professor for Hebrew Bible at Georg‐August‐University since 1995 and a member of the Academy of Sciences and Humanities Göttingen since 1999. His main fields of research are the history of the biblical literature, Ancient Near Eastern and biblical prophecy, and Judaism in Persian and Hellenistic‐Roman times (including the Dead Sea Scrolls).
Amélie Kuhrt is Professor Emeritus of Ancient Near Eastern History at University College London and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is author of The Ancient Near East (2 vols., 1995) and The Persian Empire – A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Empire (2 vols., 2007). Her research areas are Mesopotamia in the first millennium BCE and the Achaemenid and Seleucid empires. She co‐organized and co‐edited with Heleen Sancisci‐Weerdenburg five of the Achaemenid History Workshops.
Walter Kuntner is Senior Researcher at the University of Innsbruck. He has conducted numerous excavations in the Near East and specializes in the archeology of the first millennium BCE. He is currently conducting excavations in Aramus, Armenia, Khovle Gora, Georgia, and Chors, Iran.
Angelika Lohwasser is Full Professor for Egyptology at the University of Münster, Germany. She is an expert in the archeology and history of Nubia. Other research interests are material culture, iconography in ancient Nubia and Egypt, funerary archeology, and conceptions of the body.
Andreas Mehl, born in 1945, was between 1985 and 2011 a Professor for Ancient History at the universities of Koblenz‐Landau, Darmstadt, Erlangen‐Nürnberg, and Halle‐Wittenberg. His fields of research are Cyprus in antiquity, Hellenism (Seleucid Empire), ancient (Roman) historiography, and history of culture.
Mischa Meier is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Tübingen. His main focus is Greek history in the archaic and classical eras, as well as Roman history in the early and late Imperial period and in late antiquity.
Wolfgang Messerschmidt is Free Scholar at Cologne University, Germany. His special research areas are the archeology and history of the Ancient Middle East in Hellenistic times, Babylon from the Neo‐Babylonian to the Hellenistic period, and Achaemenid Iran.
Ali Mousavi studied in Lyon, France, and obtained his PhD in Near Eastern Archeology from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Persepolis. Discovery and Afterlife of a World Wonder (2012). He teaches Iranian archeology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Krzysztof Nawotka, educated at Wroclaw, Oxford, and Columbus, OH (PhD in Classics 1991), is Ancient History Professor at the University of Wroclaw, Poland. His principal books are The Western Pontic Cities: History and Political Organization (1997), Boule and Demos in Miletus and its Pontic Colonies (1999), Alexander the Great (2010), The Alexander Romance by Ps.‐Callisthenes: A Historical Commentry (2017), and Epigraphic Culture in the Eastern Mediterranean in Antiquity (2020).
Astrid Nunn is a Near Eastern Archaeologist, former adjunct Professor at the University of Würzburg (Germany). Her main fields of interest are the Achaemenids in the Levant, polychromy, and iconography.
Daniel T. Potts is Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology and History at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University. He received his PhD from Harvard and has worked extensively in Iran, both at Tepe Yahya and in the Mamasani region.
Joachim Friedrich Quack studied Egyptology, Semitic Languages, Biblical Archaeology, Assyriology, and Prehistory at the universities of Tübingen and Paris. He is Director of the Institute of Egyptology at Heidelberg University. He is a full member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of the Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. He was awarded the Leibniz Prize in 2011.
Claude Rapin is an Archeologist and Researcher at the CNRS (UMR‐8546), École normale supérieure, Paris, “Archéologies d’Orient et d’Occident et textes anciens (AOROC)” and Privatdozent at the University of Lausanne. He has undertaken excavations in Afghanistan (Ai Khanum) and Uzbekistan (Samarkand‐Afrasiab, Koktepe, Iron Gates near Derbent, Kindikli‐tepe, Yangi‐rabat, Sangir‐tepe). He has published on the archeology, history, and historical geography of Central Asia.
Robert Rollinger is Full Professor at the Department of Ancient History and Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Leopold‐Franzens Universität Innsbruck since 2005. From 2011 to 2015 he was Finland Distinguished Professor at the Department of World Cultures, University of Helsinki, from 2021–2025 he holds a NAWA chair as Visiting Professor at the University of Wrocław, Poland (Programme “From the Achaemenids to the Romans: Contextualizing empire and its longue‐durée developments”). His main research interests are Greek historiography, history of the first millennium BCE, and comparative empire studies.
Adriano V. Rossi is Professor Emeritus of Iranian philology at L’Orientale University, Naples, where he was Rector from 1992 to 1998. He is a member of many academies and scientific societies, including Accademia dei Lincei, Rome. His main subjects (with more than 200 publications) are Iranian linguistics/philology and dialectology. Since 2002 he has been Director of the international project DARIOSH (Digital edition of the Achaemenid royal inscriptions) and since 2016 President of ISMEO‐Rome.
Kai Ruffing is Professor for Ancient History at the University of Kassel, Germany. His main interests in research include the social and economic history of the ancient world, classical historiography, and transcultural contacts between Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures in antiquity.
Mirjo Salvini has been Director of the Institute for Aegean and Near Eastern Studies, Rome. His special research focus is on philology and history of the Ancient Near East in very broad terms. He has done extensive field work in Armenia, Turkey, Syria, and Iran. He has edited and published cuneiform texts from Boghazköy (Hittite), Syria (Akkadian and Hurrian), Iran (Linear Elamite), and Armenia,
