Massimo MAIOCCHI

Massimo Maiocchi is an expert in History of the Ancient Near East,with special reference to early urbanization in between the late forth and the end of third millennia BCE.

He is PhD in Ancient Near East at the University of Naples "L'Orientale" (2007) and a MA in Humanities at Ca' Foscari (2003). He has been a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (France, 2020-2021), and post-doc at the University of Chicago (USA, 2012-2015). He also collaborated with the International Institute for Mesopotamian Area Studies, Los Angeles (USA, 2016). In addition, he has been a research fellow at Ca' Foscari, as well as at the Venice International University. Early in his education, he studied in Finland (University of Helsinki) and Germany (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen). In Chicago, he taught History of the Ancient Near East, Philology of cuneiform sources, History of Writing Systems. He took part in research missions in international institutions and museums: British Museum, Cornell University, Musée du Louvre, Iraq Museum.He also took part in archaeological missions and surveys in Syria (Urkesh, modern Tell Mozan) and Iraq (Iraqi Kurdistan).

He published four monographs, as well as several articles in scientific journals, on topics such as: origin and diffusion of writing, grammatology, palaeography, organization of knowledge, palaeo-archivistics, techniques and technologies for the transmission of information in the ancient world, their impact in terms of cultural evolution and intellectual history; administration, accounting systems, standards for weights and measures, circulation of precious items; techniques for transformation and conservation of almentary products, palaeo-nutritional practices; social history; legal practices and law collections; developments in royal ideology in third and second millennia BCE; current methodologies for the study of ancient history.

His approach combines traditional research and Digital Humanities solutions, such as implementation of databases for the study of ancient inscriptions (Ebla Digital Archives; Archaic Text Graphemics), network analysis, and scripting. 

He is part of an internationa network of research, including experts from France, Spain and United States. Presently, he has active collaborations with the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (Rome), as well as the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (Nanterre, Francia). Since September 2023 he is P.I. for the project "Early Economy Begins", funded by PRIN.