Karen Sonik is a cultural and art historian specializing in the ancient Near East. She is currently a member of the School for Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2021¿22); Associate Professor in the Department of Art & Art History at Auburn University; and a consulting scholar in the Babylonian Section at the Penn Museum. She earned her PhD in the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World at the University of Pennsylvania and is editor of Art/ifacts and ArtWorks in the Ancient World (2021); Journey to the City: A Companion to the Middle East Galleries at the Penn Museum (with S. Tinney; 2019); and The Materiality of Divine Agency (with B. Pongratz-Leisten; 2015), and a forthcoming volume on Mesopotamian literature. Her research has been supported by organizations including the American Philosophical Society; the American Council for Learned Societies; the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University; and the Kolb Foundation. Her current projects draw on developing research into the emotions, senses, and aesthetics of the ancient Near East to explore what it meant to be human at the dawn of urban civilization.

Ulrike Steinert is a postdoctoral researcher in the Research Training Group 1876 "Early Concepts of Humans and Nature" at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany. Her research interests and publications focus on ancient Mesopotamian medicine, religion and cultural history, the Akkadian language, women¿s health, and gender and body concepts, as well as metaphor research. She is the author of a study on the body, self, and identity in Mesopotamian texts, entitled Aspekte des Menschseins im Alten Mesopotamien. Eine Studie zu Person und Identität im 2. und 1. Jt. v. Chr. (2012) and is currently preparing a monograph on Women¿s Health Care in Ancient Mesopotamia: An Edition of the Textual Sources.