Wadeea Zerkly

Academic Mentor: Holger Klein, Lisa and Bernard Selz Professor of Medieval Art History, Columbia University

Research Topic:

The Town of Ekalte and its People: The Urban Structure and Settings of the Late Bronze Age Settlement of Tall Munbāqa

Wadeea Zerkly is a PhD student at the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of Munich. Wadeea holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Archaeology and a Master's Degree in Semitic Languages, both from the University of Aleppo. In his master's thesis, he worked on the late Bronze Age cuneiform tablets of wills in Syria, producing an Arabic translation with a Philological study of the documents. Wadeea also worked at the Department of Archaeology at Aleppo University as a lecturer for Assyriology, west Asian Archaeology, and methodology of Archaeological research.

Zerkly has been a doctoral fellow at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich and worked there since 2017 on several academic and research projects, amongst them is Project EBL which he contributed by providing an Akkadian-Arabic Online Dictionary.

Wadeea's research interests cover urban and social structures of the Late Bronze Age settlements in Northern Syria, Landscape Archaeology, Architecture, and use of space, as well as ancient West Asian legal documents.

At Columbia Global Centers | Amman, Zerkly is working on finishing his PhD research and thesis, which aims to interpret the late Bronze Age urban structure of Tall Munbāqa on the left bank of the Euphrates in Northern Syria and examine the dynamic relations between the social and urban structures of the town implementing an archaeological and epigraphical interdisciplinary approach.

Selected Publications:

2013 “The Connections Between Dowry and Inheritance in the Middle Euphrates Region through the Late Bronze Age”, Research Journal of Aleppo University. Arts & Humanities Science Series, Vol 87, (2013) (in Arabic). 

2013 “A Will Document from Tell Munbaqa (Ekalte)”, Research Journal of Aleppo University. Arts & Humanities Science Series, Vol 88, (2013) (in Arabic). 

2008 “Petra, The Archaeological Journal of Aleppo”, Vol.2, (2008), p.p: 19-31 (in Arabic).