RaT Fellow
Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Asterios E. Kechagias is a RaT Fellow at the Department of Religious Studies and a postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He has studied Theology (B.A. 2012), Biblical Studies (M.A. 2014), and modern German philosophy (M.A 2016) at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, where he also received his Ph.D. in Biblical Studies and Ancient Near East in 2021. During and after his doctoral studies (2018–2022), he studied many different ancient languages of the East at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian Dialects, Aramaic, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Sanskrit) and at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Hittite, Syriac Aramaic, Sahidic Coptic). His main areas of research are biblical studies, ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean history, geography and linguistics, ancient astronomy and the origin of constellations, methodology of ancient historical research, and cross-cultural contacts during the third and second millennia BCE with an emphasis on ancient India and the Indus Valley Civilization. He has won several competitive scholarships and is the author of several articles in Greek and English. Currently, he is working on a study of the ancient Ethiopians, as presented in Mediterranean, Mesopotamian, and Indian sources, as well as on the study of the Mediterranean traditions of lands of bliss and their correlation with corresponding traditions of the East.