Master Assyriology (research) (MA) postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

On one relief slab from Ashurnasirpal II's palace at Nimrud, the carver left out a single sign in the king's titulary, and nobody seems to have corrected it. I noticed the omission while comparing published copies of the Standard Inscription for my undergraduate dissertation. It is a small thing, but it raised the question my research has circled ever since: how were long texts reproduced, hundreds of times, by people working on walls rather than tablets?

The Standard Inscription suited that question because it is so repetitive. The same narrative of titles, campaigns and building work runs across the palace reliefs, often cut straight through the carved scenes. Working from Grayson's edition and the photographs available to me, I built a spreadsheet recording, line by line, where versions on different slabs abbreviated, reordered or broke off. I could not see the originals, so I was cautious in my conclusions. Even so, patterns emerged. Some variants clustered in ways that suggested shared working copies or teams, while others looked like ordinary slips of the chisel. Truncations often coincided with the end of the available stone, which suggested that the physical surface sometimes decided how much of the text appeared. My supervisor encouraged me to separate what the evidence showed from what I hoped it showed, and the dissertation's final chapter was largely a careful list of questions I could not yet answer.

Those questions are mostly philological. Over two years of Akkadian I moved from Old Babylonian grammar to reading Neo-Assyrian royal texts in transliteration, and I took a short introductory course in Sumerian. I am still slow with signs from cuneiform copies, especially less common values, and I want structured training in palaeography and in reading from photographs and hand copies rather than relying on someone else's transliteration. I would also like to read more widely beyond royal inscriptions. Letters and administrative records from the Neo-Assyrian state would let me ask whether the habits I saw on palace walls, such as formula, abbreviation and adaptation to space, appear in everyday scribal work too.

Since graduating I have worked in a print and copy shop. Most of the job is routine: thesis binding, posters, menus for local cafés. It has made me attentive to how copies drift. A customer's file passes through two or three hands, someone resizes a margin, and a line disappears. I do not want to overstate the parallel with an Assyrian workshop, but it has made me less inclined to treat every variant as meaningful and more interested in the practical conditions of production.

Each week I also read articles for a local talking newspaper for people with visual impairments. Reading aloud to a schedule has improved my concentration on unfamiliar names and my willingness to stop and check rather than guess, which is useful when I meet a damaged line of Akkadian. Outside work I walk long-distance footpaths and have slowly been learning German, which I now read well enough to work through scholarly articles with a dictionary.

A research-focused master's appeals to me because I want to test whether my dissertation questions can grow into a sustained project, perhaps on scribal practice across monumental and archival texts. I know I need stronger language skills, closer contact with primary sources and guidance on method before that is realistic. I would bring patience with repetitive material, careful record-keeping and an honest sense of how much I still have to learn.