Robert Francis Harper's Assyrian and Babylonian Letters

Robert (Bob) Francis Leslie Logan (1917-2016)

Professor Robert Francis Leslie Logan, known to his colleagues as Bob, was professor of Organization of Health Care System at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). He chaired Department of Community medicine when I studied LSHTM in 1981/1982 as postgraduate student. Professor Logan was an innovative teacher and very communicative person. Concerned that students might lack real...

Mesopotamia Neo - Assyrian Period

No collection of laws from the iNeo-Assyrian period is known to us. If a text of this kind had ever existed, it seems highly likely that it would have been part of Assurbanipal's famous library in Nineveh. But neither in Nineveh nor in twenty-three excavated sites located in different parts of the empire have archaeologists have succeeded in unearthing so much as a fragment of such a text. In a...

Babylonian and Indian Astronomy: Early Connections

Did the Indian and Babylonian astronomy evolve in isolation, was there mutual influence, or was one dependent on the other? Scholars have debated these questions for more than two centuries, and opinion has swung one way or the other with time. The similarities between the two systems that have been investigated are: the use of 30 divisions of the lunar month; the 360 divisions of the civil yea...

Francis X . Diebold “ The Nobel Memorial Prize for Robert F . Engle

The Babylonian benefit

E nter any research laboratory and you will most likely find an almost Babylonian confusion: French researchers discussing their experiments in French, but quickly switching to English when joined by their Chinese colleague. A German researcher may answer the phone in German while talking to a Spanish colleague in English. English is the de facto lingua franca of science: of research papers, gr...