Professor Andrew R George

Andrew George studied Assyriology at the University of Birmingham (1973–79) and for a while kept a public house in Darlaston. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on “Babylonian Topographical Texts” under the supervision of W. G. Lambert (1985). From 1983 to 2020 he taught Akkadian and Sumerian language and literature at SOAS, University of London, where he is now Emeritus Professor of Babylonian. 

His specialisms are Babylonian literature, religion and intellectual culture. He has been elected Fellow of the British Academy (2006) and Honorary Member of the American Oriental Society (2012). He is a former Visiting Professor at the University of Heidelberg (2000), Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2004–5), Research Associate at Rikkyo University, Tokyo (2009) and Senior Research Fellow of the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust (2012–13). He was founding chairman of the London Centre for the Ancient Near East (1995–2000) and for seventeen years co-editor of the archaeological journal Iraq (1994–2011). 

His best-known books are a critical edition of the Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic for OUP (2003) and a prize-winning translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh for Penguin Classics (2000). Most recently he has published five volumes of new texts from cuneiform tablets now in Norway: Babylonian Literary Texts (2009), Cuneiform Royal Inscriptions (2011), and Babylonian Divinatory Texts (2013), Mesopotamian Incantations (2016), and Assyrian Archival Documents in the Schøyen Collection (2017). Further volumes are in preparation.

Babylonian literature; Gilgamesh; Babylon; cultic topography