Doctoral Student Fellow
Ph.D Candidate, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
This Stone I Carved Myself: Monumental Writing in Iron Age Central Anatolia
Ryan Schnell is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. He received a B.A. from Brigham Young University and an M.A. from the University of Chicago. A cultural historian of pre-classical Anatolia, his research relates to issues surrounding the production and interpretation of writing as a physical medium, especially regarding issues of agency and cultural-linguistic signaling.
His dissertation, entitled “This Stone I Carved Myself: Monumental Writing in Iron Age Central Anatolia,” discusses the production of monumental stone carvings, of which writing was a key component, in the canton states of Early and Middle Iron Age Central Anatolia north of the Taurus. His work focuses on understanding the visual and linguistic markers evident in the stonework’s physical and stylistic makeup and how these markers were evidence of political and cultural agency in the face of territorial expansion by rival states.