The areas around the Mediterranean Sea have a rich and fascinating past. Do you want to explore these ancient and diverse cultures of the Mediterranean World? In the Dutch-taught Bachelor's programme Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Leiden University you will study the world of Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia…

Synthetic microswimmers take an important place within the interdisciplinary field of active soft matter.

The Near East, situated at the nexus of Europe, Africa, and Asia, was central to the development of ancient societies in all three continents.

The main objective of this research is to map out the cities of the Roman Near East in the imperial period, with a focus on location, city size and urban features, in order to study the form the urban system and its levels of integration.

Promotor: Prof. dr. A.G.G.M. Tielens

Promotor: M.L. van Hecke, Co-Promotor: B.P. Tighe

This thesis explores the theoretical and observational properties of distant massive galaxies that harbour active black holes in their centres and shine brightly at radio wavelengths.

This thesis covers several aspects of quantum algorithms for near-term quantum computers and its applications to quantum chemistry and material science.

This project aims at investigating the multidirectional effects of forced and voluntary forms of migration in the ancient Near East.

Les Cottés is one the rare site in western Europe with occupations in sequence by the very last Neandertals and the first anatomically modern humans.

How to identify patients at risk of developing devastating, metastatic disease and facilitate the development of personalised treatment for prostate cancer patients?

This thesis addresses questions on effectively using variational quantum circuits for machine learning tasks.

This thesis has shed light on some of the ways in which the local electrolyte composition can differ from the bulk and how these changes in the local reaction environment can determine the activity and/or selectivity of two important electrocatalytic reactions, namely, electrochemical CO2 reduction…

Authority and Control in the Countryside looks at the economic, religious, political and cultural instruments that local and regional powers in the late antique to early medieval Mediterranean and Near East used to manage their rural hinterlands.

Quasicrystals are crystals with ‘impossible’ five-fold symmetries, which nevertheless were synthesized in the lab in 1982. Paul J. Steinhardt helped figure out their structure, but he didn’t stop at that.

The project ‘Between the Holy Land and the World’ proposes a connected history of the Christian communities in the Near East (1900-1948) by means of a study of unpublished Franciscan and Dominican photographic collections.

Archaeologists and students from Leiden University and local volunteers have found a Roman camp in the woods near Ermelo. The camp is four kilometres away from another Roman fortification discovered some time ago. This confirms the idea that the Romans would also often explore beyond the boundaries…

Three Leiden astronomers have shown that some asteroids that are considered harmless for now, can collide with Earth in the future. They did their research with the help of an artificial neural network. The results have been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Satellites belonging to American space company SpaceX recently came very close to a Chinese space station. Experts are calling for traffic management rules in space.

An Ancient Egyptian System of Workmen’s Identity Marks

Palaeography of an ancient nomadic writing culture

An interdisciplinary study of the Persian Period

This historical study argues that the Mandaean religion originated under Sasanid rule in the fifth century, not earlier as has been widely accepted. It analyzes primary sources in Syriac, Mandaic, and Arabic to clarify the early history of Mandaeism.

The life cycle of comets near the star Beta Pictoris is similar to that of comets in our own solar system. This is the conclusion of a team of astronomers from the Netherlands, France and Brazil. It seems that, just like in our own solar system, there are fewer comets as the star gets older. The researchers,…

NINO BA and MA Thesis Prize 2018

This dissertation is a study of archaeological remains left behind by nomadic communities in the Black Desert, situated in the northeast of modern Jordan.

Innovating objects in a Eurasian center of the Late Hellenistic period.

Are you interested in ancient Egypt, the rich cultural heritage of Mesopotamia or bliblical Hebrew and Aramaic? Students of all faculties can follow electives of Ancient Near Eastern Studies without prior knowledge or special entry requirements. Archaeology student Annely Arends talks about her expe…

The rationale, construction, and function of the imperial capitals of Assyria

The Assyrian Empire was the first state to achieve durable domination of the Ancient Near East, enduring some seven centuries and, eventually, controlling most of the region. Yet, we know little about how this empire emerged from a relatively minor polity in the Tigris region and how it managed to consolidate…

This volume sees the publication of fifty-six early Old Babylonian letters from ca. 1880 BCE. They were found by legendary Iraqi archaeologist Taha Baqir in 1941 at the site of Tell ed-Dēr, ancient Sippar-Amnānum, in central Iraq.

The orbits of 27 stars orbiting closely around the black hole at the center of our Milky Way are very chaotic. As a result, researchers cannot predict with confidence where they will be in about 462 years. ‘That is astonishingly short,’ says astronomer Simon Portegies Zwart who collaborated on the r…

When hobby divers revisited a nearly 400-year-old shipwreck off the coast of Texel, they discovered more than 1,000 objects in wooden boxes. Eight years later, postdoc Janet Dickinson used recovered books to compile a profile of the mysterious owner.

Conference

Reconstructing Later Prehistoric Societies in Northern Iraq (ca. 7000-3000 BCE)

Promotor: E.R. Eliel, Co-Promotor: M.J.A. de Dood

The Archaeology of Imperial Landscapes examines the transformation of rural landscapes and societies that formed the backbone of ancient empires in the Near East and Mediterranean. Through a comparative approach to archaeological data, it analyses the patterns of transformation in widely differing imperial…

This thesis explores several aspects of these Early Old Babylonian Amorites.

Promotor: M. Franx, Co-Promotor: I.F. Labbé

Symposium

PhD defence

Throughout history, a large portion of the world's population has lived under imperial rule. Although scholars do not always agree on when and where the roots of imperialism lie, most would agree that imperial configurations have affected human history so profoundly that the legacy of ancient empires…

Hekmat Dirbas defended his thesis on 14 February 2017