Denise Pätzold, MA

Projects

Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’ (2026–2032)

• 2026–2029: Principal Investigator of the project IRP13:
  Reconstruction Families of Ancient Babylon Based on Manuscripts of Private Archives: Cuneiform Tablets from Babylon Dating to the Long Sixth Century BCE

Research Interests

• Neo-Babylonian Economic, Legal and Social History
• Neo-Assyrian Slavery
• Mesopotamian Literature
• Sumerian and Akkadian Philology

CV

Denise Pätzold studied Ancient Near Eastern Studies and Egyptology/Coptology at the University of Göttingen and received her master’s degree in 2023.

During her studies, she worked as a student assistant at the Institute of Ancient Near Eastern Studies since 2018, and as a research assistant from her graduation in 2023 until 2025. Her primary responsibilities were public relations, IT and the administration of the ‘Myth Library’.

From 2023 to 2025, she was also involved in the ERC-funded project ‘SLaVEgents: Enslaved Persons in the Making of Societies and Cultures in Western Eurasia and North Africa, 1000 BCE – 300 CE’ at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies of the Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (Rethymno, Greece). In this project, she was responsible for the Neo-Assyrian sources.

At the end of 2024 she started her PhD at the University of Leipzig but changed to the University of Hamburg in 2026, where she is now a doctoral researcher at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC). Her research project focuses on the private archives in Babylon during the Neo-Babylonian Empire, with a particular emphasis on the city’s families and the clay tablets discovered in these archives.