Dr. Assaf Kleiman

My life before BGU:​

I was born and raised in Rishon LeZion. I got all my academic degrees at the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures at Tel Aviv University. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the settlement history and material culture of the central Levant during the Early Iron Age under the guidance of Prof. Israel Finkelstein and Prof. Benjamin Sass. For my postdoc I went to Leipzig University in Germany, where I did a comparative study of geopolitical processes in Syria and the southern Levant at the beginning of the first millennium BCE.

Why BGU?

It’s a young university, with outstanding researchers and a great atmosphere.​

My rese​arch:

I am an archaeologist of the late Bronze and Iron Ages in the Levant; the field is sometimes called ‘biblical archaeology’ or ‘archaeology of the ancient near east.’ My primary research focus is on how the political regimes of the kingdoms of Israel and Aram-Damascus affected settlement patterns and cultural processes in what is today northeastern Israel, Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley and southern Syria. This subject is particularly exciting to me because archaeological research allows us to reconstruct the lifeways of unknown populations that aren’t mentioned in the texts from that period (“people without a history”), to understand their interactions with neighboring regions, and to understand the transformations in local material culture following the appearance of new powers in the region.