Dr. Vitali Bartash 

Research project: “Foreign Forced Labour in Early Mesopotamia”

I am a specialist in the languages and history of the ancient Near East with a focus on Sumer, southern Iraq in 3500-2000 BC. Previously I have studied weight metrology (Frankfurt 2010-2013), children (Munich 2016-2019) and kinship (Berkeley 2020) in Sumer.
My project at the BCDSS is about foreign captives, deportees and slaves in the earliest transregional states of the Near East, the Akkadian and Ur III Kingdoms (24th-21st centuries BC). I test the hypothesis that the state as a network of palatial, temple and private households depended on and craved for forced foreign labour. I argue that these complex states would not have been sustainable without the import of foreign labour. Using figurative language, foreigners were the yeasts that allowed the dough to grow.
 I aim to find out how and where these early complex societies procured foreigners, who were these incomers in terms of ethnicity, age and gender, on which terms they were integrated (slaves, serfs or free) and how local households profited from their labour. On the theoretical level, I explore the relationship between socio-political complexity, space, mobility, ethnicity, age and gender.
This study relies on the philological, historical, demographic and spatial analysis of some 100.000 archival, legal, lexical and literary cuneiform documents written in Sumerian and Akkadian (Early Semitic) languages.

3 books, 16 articles and chapters and 5 reviews. 20 invited lectures and conference papers.

2010–2013
Ph.D. in Assyriology, University of Frankfurt/Main, Germany

2008–2009
Studies of Assyriology, University of Göttingen, Germany

2002–2007
Diploma Studies in History (specialization in Ancient and Medieval History), Belarusian State University, Minsk, Belarus

since 2020
Postdoctoral researcher, Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, University of Bonn, Germany

2020
DFG Visiting Researcher, University of California Berkeley, Department of Near Eastern Studies. Research project “Kinship in Sumer”

2016–2019
Researcher in the individual DFG research project “Between protection and exploitation: Children in temple and palace households as a socioeconomic phenomenon in Early Southern Mesopotamia (3200-2000 BC)”, University  of Munich, Germany

2014–2016
Parental leave; residence in Washington DC, Helsinki and Vienna

2013–2014
Postdoctoral fellow, DFG Research Training Group “Value and Equivalence. The genesis and transformation of values from an archaeological and anthropological perspective” (GRK 1576), University of Frankfurt/Main, Germany

2013
Research assistant, University of Göttingen, Department of Assyriology.

2010–2013
Ph.D. scholarship in DFG Research Training Group “Value and equivalence”, University of Frankfurt/Main. Pd.D. project “Establishing Value: A Historical Study of Weighing in Early Mesopotamia”

2009
Teaching assistant, University of Göttingen, Department of Assyriology

2008–2009
DAAD Visiting Scholar, University of Göttingen, Department of Assyriology. Research project “The Babylonian epic of creation Enūma eliš in its historical context”

2009–2015
Studied ca. 5000 original cuneiform tablets in the collections of the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin, Cornell  University, Yale University and the Schøyen Collection in Norway

2009–2018
Taught seven courses in culture and languages of the ancient Near East at the Universities of Göttingen, Frankfurt/Main, Munich and Cambridge                         

• German Research Foundation (DFG), Visiting Scholarship (2020-2021), University of California Berkeley
• German Research Foundation (DFG), Individual research grant (2016-2019), University of Munich
• German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), research fellowship (2008-2009), University of Göttingen

Total sum of approximately 0,4 million euros