Paul A. Delnero
 
Assistant Professor of Assyriology
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2006
B.A., Purdue University, 1995
Email: pdelner1@jhu.edu
 
Paul Delnero is an Assyriologist who specializes in the history, culture,
and society of Ancient Mesopotamia, with a particular emphasis
on the study of the Sumerian language and its grammar. His dissertation,
“Variation in Sumerian Literary Compositions: A Case Study Based on
the Decad,” was written on the subject of textual variation in duplicates
of Sumerian literary narratives. The primary aims of this work were to
answer fundamental questions pertaining to how and why scribes were
trained in antiquity, and to develop a text-critical methodology for editing
Sumerian literary compositions that takes into account the means by
which the sources for these texts were produced. Specifically, the role
of memorization in scribal training and the errors in recall that occurred
while copying from memory were identified as one of the most common
causes of textual variation in the duplicates of these texts. One of the
compositions examined in this study was a narrative text about the
legendary king of Uruk, Gilgamesh, which was integrated into the well
known Epic of Gilgamesh nearly a millennium after it was originally
composed.

In addition to a book entitled “The Textual Criticism of Sumerian
Literary Compositions,” Delnero is also writing about archival practices
in the second millennium BCE, the interaction of orality and literacy in
the Mesopotamian textual record, the function and distribution of
conjugation prefixes in the Sumerian verbal chain, tablet typology and
scribal training, and the significance of writing and recording the deeds
of rulers in the construction of Mesopotamian historical narratives.
Delnero has given papers on these and other topics at national and
international conferences, including the Rencontre Assyriologique in
Muenster and Moscow, and the annual meetings of the American
Oriental Society in Seattle, San Antonio, and Chicago.

Before coming to The Johns Hopkins University, Delnero taught
at the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, and the
University of the Arts in Philadelphia. While completing his
dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania, he also spent four
years at the Universität Leipzig in Germany, and a summer at the
Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His publications include
"Preverbal /n/: function, distribution, and stability," for the book
Analysing Literary Sumerian: Corpus-based Approaches, edited
by J. Ebeling and G. Cunningham (Equinox Press, 2007);
"The Sumerian Verbal Prefixes im-ma- and im-mi-," for the
Proceedings of the 53th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale,
Moscow-Saint Petersburg, 23-28 July 2007, edited by L. Kogan and
N. Koslova; and a review of the exhibition, “Babylon: Myth and Truth,”
at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, for the journal Near Eastern
Archaeology.