Pascal Butterlin – författare

Béatrice André-Salvini was a leading figure in the field of Near Eastern archaeology, known for her transformative work at the Louvre, particularly the reorganisation of the Persian Achaemenid rooms and her stewardship of the museum’s cuneiform tablet collection. A passionate scholar and curator, she was instrumental in landmark exhibitions such as The Birth of Writing, Babylon, and Roads of Arabia, and was deeply committed to safeguarding the heritage of the Middle East through UNESCO-led efforts. Her scholarly interests spanned from cuneiform and linear Elamite to Urartu, Ugarit, and the ancient kingdoms of Mesopotamia. Whether restoring Darius’s palace at Susa or reinterpreting the Niobe sculpture on Mount Sipylos, her contributions left an indelible mark on the field.This commemorative volume honours Béatrice’s legacy through a collection of personal tributes and academic essays from colleagues and friends. It reflects the breadth of her work—from archaeological missions in Bahrain and interpretations of Urartian inscriptions to the conservation of clay tablets using innovative methods. Essays also highlight her philological achievements, including the decoding of rare trilingual Ugaritic texts and her dedication to the lives and work of pioneering Orientalists. More than a scholarly tribute, the book is a heartfelt homage to a life spent revealing and preserving the cultural wealth of the ancient Near East.

Entangled Temporalities in Mari raises the question of the close interweaving between field research and the construction of a historical object, one of the most famous city-states of the sumero-akkadian world. Working on this site, which has been severely damaged by the Syrian conflict, means unravelling the threads of a complex weave of field situations that turn the site into a veritable palimpsest. On a tell of more than 140 ha, the remains of three superimposed cities, as well as cemeteries, are intertwined. They have been partially cleared and left to erode, occasionally restored, then subjected to one of the most intense looting operations of the Syrian conflict. Untangling these threads means conducting an investigation that leads from the current situation in the field to a dual archaeology: that of the archives of the archaeological mission and its history, and that of a city  conceived as an object of history, progressively constructed along the lines of stereotypes typical of archaeological Orientalism. After reconstructing this framework, we propose a dynamic vision of the evolution of a site and then of its monumental center, through a re-evaluation of the documentation as a whole.