Matthew Stolper

Matthew Stolper is the John A. Wilson Professor of Assyriology in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the College at the University of Chicago. He spent two days on campus and delivered a lecture on Thursday, May 6, titled "From Persepolis before Persepolis: the Persepolis Fortification Archive in Chicago" which discussed not only the discoveries from the Persepolis Fortification Archive and the knowledge we have gained and will gain of the ancient Persian Empire, but also the cultural heritage issues and legal issues surrounding the tablets. He was also a Distinguished Visitor in Professor Philip Venticinque's CLA 275: Topic: Gods, Goddesses, & Cults course.

Stolper is one of the leading authorities on the ancient Persian Empire and has taught, lectured, and written extensively on the social, economic, and political history of Persia and the Near East in the first millennium BCE, and its bearing on the present day. In addition, he has published editions of texts and authored a grammar of Elamite (the administrative language of the Persian Empire). Stolper leads an international team of scholars, researchers, and graduate and undergraduate students charged with digitizing, deciphering, preserving, and publishing the Persepolis Fortification Archive, roughly 20,000 texts written in Elamite, Aramaic, Old Persian, and Greek.

The Persepolis Fortification Archive Project is a new phase in recording and distributing the information that brings about these changes, using electronic equipment and media alongside the conventional tool-kits of philology and scholarship. In its early phases, the PFA Project has: The tablets — more than 10,000 of them from a long-buried Persian government archive at Persepolis — are at the center of a lobbying effort in the U.S. Congress. They were discovered in 1933 and have been in the United States since 1936, on loan from Iran for study. Scholars, research institutions and Iranian-American groups are trying to protect them from being seized and auctioned off for the benefit of people who have legal claims against the current Iranian government over acts of terrorism.