Spring and Summer 2024 Semesters in Review at JHU

As the summer comes to a close and the new academic year begins, I spent some time reflecting on what I’ve accomplished so far this year and how I want to approach my final year of coursework. Here’s my Spring and Summer 2024 semesters in review at Johns Hopkins’s Department of Near Eastern Studies and abroad.

Spring 2024 Semester

In the spring, I took five classes (professors in parentheses): Advanced Ugaritic (Lewis); History of Hebrew (Mandell); Advanced Akkadian (Mandell); Elementary Sumerian II (Delnero); and Near Eastern History: Late Period Egypt (Jasnow). I also audited Coptic (Jasnow).

Advanced Ugaritic: My favorite class this semester was Prof. Lewis’s Advanced Ugaritic course where each week was devoted to reading ritual texts, such as KTU 1.23; 1.40; 1.100; 1.107; 1.169; 1.96; 1.179; 1.178; and 1.82. For my final paper, I wrote on KTU 1.78 and Ugaritic astrological science. This short text reads, “At the six(th hour) of the day of the New Moon of (the month) Ḫiyyār, Šapšu set; her gatekeeper was Rašpu. They shall examine livers: danger/beware!” I put this text in conversation with RIJ 78/14 about Lunar Omens and RS 24.249 about the Month Ḫiyyāru as well as discussed what I called “the future of historical archeoastronomy” and the use of artificial intelligence and computer simulation in order to utilize precise astronomical data and sophisticated machine learning algorithms to recreate the positions and movements of celestial bodies in the past.

History of Hebrew: This class was good, but we got behind schedule and barely made it past Late Biblical Hebrew. Many of the discussions revolved around whether we can date biblical Hebrew texts (which I think we can, pace Young, Rezetko, and Ehrensvärd). My favorite week of the semester was when we talked about the development of Hebrew vowels, and each student presented on a chapter in Suchard’s The Development of the Biblical Hebrew Vowels (I chose attenuation). In the last couple weeks, we touched on Qumran, Samaritan, and Rabbinic Hebrew as well as Jewish reading traditions in Palestine, Babylon, and beyond, which all deserve their own dedicated course. My final paper covered the history of the form and function of the suffix conjugation from Pre-Proto-Semitic down to Hebrew, including a section on the forms of the SC in the Canaanizing Amarna letters (cp. e.g. maqtātī and maqtītī in the Šuwardata letters; also, some 28 of the 120 active transitive SC forms declined in the 1cs have the Akk. –āku suffix).

Advanced Akkadian: Prof. Mandell also taught the Advanced Akkadian course which covered the Canaanite Amarna letters. This class was also good, but I felt there was too much primary and secondary source reading. We also all took turns presenting on the site/region in question and leading the discussion of the texts for that week. While a helpful professionalization exercise, it was extremely time consuming (but at least now we have a bunch of PowerPoints for job talks, etc.). I presented on the Tyre letters and texts from the Southern Coast. My final project for the class was a presentation of the Canaanite Shift in the Amarna letters from both a historical linguistic and sociolinguistic perspective. I happily admit that, despite the grueling workload, this was one of the two or three classes in which I learned the most this semester.

Elementary Sumerian II: This class was a continuation of Elementary Sumerian I which I took last semester. The professor of the course is brilliant and his pedagogy quite effective. I’m disappointed that he’s on sabbatical for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Near Eastern History: Late Period Egypt: One of the benefits of the Johns Hopkins program is an emphasis on the interdisciplinary study of the entire ancient Near East. Therefore, all students in the department must complete a three-year Near Eastern history cycle including a year of Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Syro-Palestinian history. The focus of this academic year is Egyptian history, and the focus of this semester was the end of the 2nd through 1st millennia BCE. We read a lot of primary literature in translation, which was fun.

Coptic (audit): This was a continuation of Intro to Coptic which I took last semester. Egyptian language and linguistics remains a peripheral interest of mine, and Coptic is extremely important since it uses the Greek script which records vowels.

Extracurriculars: In addition to these six classes, I also participated in a number of extracurricular activities within and outside of the university, including department lectures by Christopher Rollston, Petra Creamer (ANŠE lecturer), Madadh Richey, and Tim Harrison (Albright lecturer). I helped out with a couple of website projects other than the present one and continued posting on The Digital Semitics Online Library. Some of my most enjoyable experiences were participating in a weekly Semitics reading group where we read a number of primary and secondary readings in Semitic studies.

Summer 2024 Research Travels

This summer, I traveled quite a bit and have written dedicated posts about my time in the Iberian Peninsula, Oxford, Leipzig, Antwerp, Venice, Leiden and Amsterdam, and Copenhagen.

Lisbon, Portugal (Aug 3-9)

Amid six summer schools and one conference in Europe this summer, I had a few days of respite to take a vacation in Lisbon, Portugal (August 3rd-9th). My good friend Anthony, a Washington, D.C. consultant and MBA student at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, flew out to meet me during my week off. (By the way, UVA’s Darden School is consistently ranked in the top 10 MBA programs nationally and top 20 globally. Bloomberg BusinessWeek recently listed it as tied with Dartmouth for third overall just behind Stanford and UChicago.)

Philadelphia and New York (Aug 19-22)

I returned to the USA on August 19th, flying into Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I spent two days there seeing famous sites such as Independence Hall (where the US Declaration of Independence and Constitution were signed), the Liberty Bell (a symbol of American identity and liberty), and the place where Benjamin Franklin lived and worked as a printer. I also visited the University of Pennsylvania and The Penn Museum which has a large ancient Near Eastern collection. Afterward, I spent a couple days in Manhattan, New York, which included seeing a number of interesting places, including the 9/11 Memorials, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Wall Street, the New York Stock Exchange, and Trump Tower. The highlight of the trip (and arguably the entire summer) was seeing Hamilton on Broadway after devouring a tomahawk steak at Brooklyn Chop House.

Fall 2024 Semester

In conclusion, the Spring and Summer semesters certainly have been rewarding, and I’m thankful to the Department of Near Eastern Studies and Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins for awarding me travel grants that enabled these trips. I especially thank Prof. Mandell for writing a letter of support on my behalf. The Fall 2024 semester is now underway, and I’m taking four classes at JHU and auditing three more in the Department of Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literatures at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.: Evolution of Hebrew Linguistic Thought (Chen at JHU); Deuteronomistic History (Mandell at JHU); Advanced Akkadian (Lauinger at JHU); History of Syria-Palestine (Mandell at JHU); Quranic and Classical Arabic (Talia at CUA); Hebrew Poetry (Gross at CUA); and Targumic Aramaic (Cook at CUA). I look forward to a rigorous but rewarding semester ahead!

About The Author

Matthew Saunders

Matthew Saunders is a PhD student in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He researches the languages and literatures of the ancient Near East, especially Aramaic Studies, Ugaritic Studies, and Comparative Semitics.

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