Prof. Dr. Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum is Professor of Assyriology (Languages and History of the Ancient Near East) at Freie Universität Berlin. She studied Assyriology, Semitic Languages, Classical Archeology, Archaeology of the Near East at Eberhard Karls-Universität Tübingen, at the Pontificio Istituto Biblico Universitá la Gregoriana,  at Universíta La Sapienza  in Rome and at Freie Universität Berlin. She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the senate of the German Research Foundation. Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum has led numerous research projects, among which currently the German Research Foundation (DFG) research group 2615 “Rethinking Oriental Despotism – Strategies of Governance and Modes of Participation in the Ancient Near East” and the Collaborative Research Center SFB 980 Episteme in Motion A01: “Episteme as Configurative Process: Internal Transfer in Cuneiform Textual Corpora”. As a philologist she is regularly concerned with the edition of cuneiform texts and serves as epigrapher to excavation projects. Her main themes of research are economic, social and political history of Ancient Mesopotamia, time and historical consciousness in early societies, and “Wirkungsgeschichte”, that is tradition, impact, transformation of Ancient Near Eastern civilizations including aspects of the history of science.