Faculty

Hervé Reculeau is a historian of Syria and Mesopotamia in the second millennium BCE. His research centers on the environmental and social histories of the ancient Near East, with a particular focus on landscapes and the interaction between humans and their environment from the technical, historical, and socioeconomic points of view. Among his special interests are irrigation practices and devices, agricultural works and techniques, and the social settings of the Syrian and Upper Mesopotamian countryside, as well as their relationship to urban centers. He also investigates the human response to environmental change, and how ancient conceptions of space impacted the spatial strategies of sedentary and nomadic groups in Upper Mesopotamia. As an epigrapher, he is in charge of editing some of the cuneiform tablets discovered at the ancient cities of Mari (Syria) and Aššur (Iraq). Reculeau has authored several scholarly articles and books on these topics, and was awarded the 2013 Prix Saintour by the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, for his book Climate, Environment and Agriculture in Assyria in the 2nd Half of the 2nd Millennium BCE.

An alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure in Fontenay/Saint-Cloud (France), Reculeau holds a B.A. and M.A. in ancient history from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, as well as an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Assyriology from the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. Before joining the ISAC and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, he taught Assyriology and conducted research at several institutions in France (the École Pratique des Hautes Études, the Collège de France, the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), Germany (the Freie Universität Berlin and Excellence Cluster 264 - TOPOI: The Formation and Transformation of Space and Knowledge in Ancient Civilisations), and Russia (the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow).