Cécile Michel

Cécile Michel (born 20 April 1962) is a French epigrapher and archaeologist.

Career After Michel defended her thesis in 1988 (Les Marchands Inaya dans les tablettes cappadociennes) at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University, she joined the CNRS in 1990. She taught at the Paris 8 University and the Institut catholique de Paris. She won the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres prize in 1999 and in 2002, the Prix Delalande-Guéreau. She supported a habilitation to direct research in 2004 at Paris VIII. Since 2007, she is in the archaeology and sciences of antiquity laboratory. A visiting professor at the Centre for Textile Research in Copenhagen, she is a member of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures in Hamburg.

A member of the international group of Assyriologists responsible for deciphering the cuneiform tablets discovered at Kültepe (central Anatolia), she conducts research on archives, Mesopotamian trade, organization of society, women and the history of Gender. Her publications also deal with everyday life and material culture in Mesopotamia, as well as education, learning to read and write. Linking the observation of a solar eclipse with the archaeological, dendrochronological and textual data, she proposed an absolute dating for the chronology of the early second millennium BC.

In July 2014, she was elected president of the International Association for Assyriology.