Margins of writing, origins of cultures: Unofficial writing in the ancient Near East and beyond. Oriental Institute Conference, February 25-26, 2005, 1155 East 58th Street, Chicago, IL. Organizer: Seth L. Sanders

"This is a conference on the politics of writing in the ancient Near East: what happens when people write their own languages, in environments dominated by imperial standard languages like Egyptian, Babylonian or Aramaic? This conference will be the first of its type, bringing together linguists, anthropologists, and scholars of the ancient Near East to discuss new directions for research. Among the senior scholars participating will be Harvard''s Peter Machinist (Hebrew Bible), Chicago''s Michael Silverstein (Linguistic Anthropology), Michigan''s Piotr Michalowski (Assyriology), and Theo van den Hout, executive editor of the Chicago Hittite Dictionary. Younger scholars include William Schniedewind, (UCLA) whose recent How the Bible Became a Book is arguably the first study of the Bible to see the question of writing as decisive for both literature and history, and John Kelly (Chicago), author of the forthcoming Technography, a study in the anthropology of knowledge focusing on the grammarians of ancient India and the engineering of Sanskrit."