Stephen Tinney

Tinney has been a member of the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies since 1996. He is also associate curator in the Babylonian section of the University Museum. Before being appointed to a faculty position, he was a research specialist on the Museum’s Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary Project. He now directs this project to create the world’s first dictionary of the first written language. He is also a consultant to the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative at UCLA, and to Oxford University’s Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature Project.

Tinney holds a B.A. and M.A. from Cambridge University and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He is the author of The Nippur Lament: Royal Rhetoric and Divine Legitimation in the Reign of Isme-Dagan of Isin (1953-1935 B.C.); his second book, Elementary Sumerian Literary Texts, is due to appear in the series Mesopotamian Civilisations next year. He is a member of Penn Arts & Sciences’ Learning and Technology Committee and the graduate groups in ancient history, and Asian and Middle Eastern studies (Near Eastern languages and civilizations), linguistics, and religious studies.