On 27 and 28 July 2007, at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg the 53rd International Congress of Assyriology and Near Eastern Archaeology which opened on 23 July 2007 in Moscow will continue its activities.
The Congress was hosted by the Russian National Institute of Humanities (Moscow) in partnership with the St. Petersburg-based State Hermitage and Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences (until recently: the St. Petersburg Branch of the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Oriental Studies).

Assyriology is a science that studies the history, culture, languages and socioeconomic aspects of the ancient Mesopotamia – the region in the valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates (modern Iraq), where the earliest civilization had flourished between the 5th and 1st millennia B.C. Created by the Sumerians, Assyrians and Babylonians, the Assyrian civilization heavily influenced other ancient cultures – Greek, Persian and Arabic and, through them, shaped the further course of culture in Europe and Asia.

Assyriologists mainly focus on written evidence from different parts of ancient Mesopotamia: cuneiform writings on clay tablets. These texts provide a wealth of information for the study of ancient history, economics and literature, as well as for comparative language studies.

The keynote themes of the 53rd International Congress of Assyriology were: Languages in the Ancient Middle East in Moscow, and Municipal Administration in the Ancient Middle East in St. Petersburg. These themes reflect the two main paths of Russian Assyriology. In St. Petersburg, the cradle of Russian Assyriology, scholars have traditionally focused on the socioeconomic aspects of Mesopotamian history, while the relatively young, but dynamic Moscow Assyriology school is mainly dedicated to the study of ancient Middle Eastern languages.

The Congress brought together over 250 participants, representing many countries from Canada in the West to Japan in the Far East. Alongside Iraq and Syria, scholars also came from Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia, where Assyriology was for many decades influenced by Russian science. This was the second Assyriology forum to take part in Russia since the 1984 Congress in Leningrad. Russia and the world have since changed dramatically, but assyriologists remain as committed as ever to working together and sharing their discoveries and ideas at their annual Assyriology forums.