Hendrik Hameeuw <hendrik.hameeuw@kuleuven.be> conveyed the following obituary:linebreak===============linebreaklinebreakKarel Van Lerberghe (1946-2026)linebreaklinebreakIt is with sadness that we must inform you that Professor Emeritus Karel Van Lerberghe passed away on 20 May, surrounded by his family. He was 79 years old.linebreaklinebreakKarel Van Lerberghe (born in Antwerp, 1946) studied Assyriology at Ghent University from 1968 to 1973, was affiliated with Leiden University from 1974 to 1978 under the supervision of Fritz Rudolf Kraus and obtained his PhD in 1980 summa cum laude under Leon De Meyer at Ghent University with a thesis on the cuneiform archive of the chief lamentation priest Ur-Utu at Sippar-Amnānum. In the same year, he was appointed as a lecturer at the Faculty of Arts at KU Leuven. He later became a full professor of Assyriology within the Ancient Near Eastern Studies programme, a position he held until his retirement in 2013.linebreaklinebreakIt was also in Ghent that he met Gabriella Voet (1948-2023), whom he later married. As an archaeologist, she conducted research into the glyptics of the Old Babylonian period. Their marriage was not only a close personal bond, but also intricately linked to Karel’s academic life: Gabriella supported Karel throughout his entire career, both in the field and with the practical organisation and administrative tasks of office work. Gabriella was also affiliated for many years as a research fellow with the same research group as Karel.linebreaklinebreakKarel’s main academic interests lay in the history of the Old Babylonian period and in the archaeology of Syria-Mesopotamia during the Early and Late Bronze Ages. He was an internationally recognised expert in the decipherment, publication and contextualisation of Old Babylonian cuneiform texts. The clay tablets he studied and published in leading book series and journals were often of a legal and administrative nature, but thanks to his meticulous analyses, they offered insights into much broader historical questions, pertaining to chronology, regional relations, daily life, and social developments such as the impact of climate change, water scarcity and migration on pre-modern societies. He was the first Assyriologist to publish archival documents from Dur-Abiešuḫ, a site which has now changed our views on Late Old Babylonian history.linebreaklinebreakAlthough Karel saw himself first and foremost as a philologist and epigraphist, his name is also strongly associated with major archaeological projects in Iraq and Syria, which he led or co-led, the most prominent being Tell Beydar (Nabada) and Tell Tweini (Gibala). Together with colleagues and an annual group of enthusiastic Assyriology and Archaeology students, he put these exceptional sites on the archaeological map. Close interaction with the Syrian research teams was central to these projects and led to fruitful international collaborations, both in the field and in the preparation of academic publications.linebreaklinebreakHe was also heavily involved in the technological disclosure of cuneiform tablets. In collaboration with ESAT/VISICS (Department of Electrical Engineering at KU Leuven), he was one of the pioneers of the Portable Light Dome System, which he enthusiastically tested alongside Gabriella Voet and colleagues on the then-existing collection of clay tablets at Cornell University. It yielded spectacular results and pointed, for Karel, to the future of the discipline: objective, reproducible digital records that make it possible to study and document cuneiform texts and make them more easily accessible. Until recently, Karel also generously granted permission for continued work with these datasets, both for new studies involving glyptics and for innovative AI and machine-learning approaches designed to train algorithms for automatic cuneiform recognition.linebreaklinebreakHis University of Leuven Lirias profile (see link at the end of this obituary) gives an impression of the scope and diversity of his academic output: peer-reviewed articles, monographs, edited volumes, book chapters, conference papers and supervised doctoral theses. The Festschrift presented to him in 2012, *The Ancient Near East, A Life! Festschrift Karel Van Lerberghe* (OLA 220), also bears witness to his academic network and influence. The volume contains 47 contributions from colleagues and former students; the emphasis on Syria and the Old Babylonian period aptly reflects both the focal points and the broad scope of Karel’s research.linebreaklinebreakWhat made Karel’s research special was the way in which he combined philological precision with archaeological context and insights from the applied natural sciences. To him, clay tablets were not merely texts, but also tangible witnesses to the societies that produced them. In doing so, he resolutely championed interdisciplinary and holistic archaeological research, assembling international teams with a wide variety of specialists and addressing numerous research questions.linebreaklinebreakKarel will also, without doubt, be remembered as a passionate and dedicated teacher who gave students a thorough grounding in the languages, history and archaeology of Mesopotamia. In his classes on Sumerian and Akkadian, he conveyed his vast knowledge in an accessible way, whilst his teaching on Mesopotamian history and archaeology captivated many. His teaching style was lively and sometimes associative: alongside the serious, substantive core of the subject, there was invariably room for anecdotes, unexpected digressions and stories from the international academic field.linebreaklinebreakAs a supervisor, Karel mentored generations of students and researchers. Several of his students and PhD candidates went on to build successful academic careers. A hallmark of his supervision was that he gave young researchers the freedom to formulate and develop their own research questions, even when these lay outside his own specialization (the Old Babylonian period). That intellectual freedom, combined with his broad knowledge and experience, made him a lasting mentor to many.linebreaklinebreakIn addition to his work as a researcher and lecturer, Karel played a significant role in the academic life of the discipline. He organised various conferences and academic meetings, the most important of which was undoubtedly the 42nd Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, the annual international conference for Assyriologists and archaeologists of the Ancient Near East. In July 1995, with Karel and Gabriella Voet as the driving forces behind the event, KU Leuven acted as the host institution. The theme of the meeting was ‘At the Cross-Roads of Civilisations in the Syro-Mesopotamian Realm: Languages and Cultures in Contact’. The meeting, which was highly appreciated by the international Assyriological community, brought together around 400 participants.linebreaklinebreakIt should not be forgotten that Karel was committed to making the cultural history of the Ancient Near East accessible to a wider audience. A nice example of this is the exhibition on the origins of writing, which the Société Générale de Belgique organised to mark its 175th anniversary. The exhibition ran from December 1997 to March 1998, and it was Karel Van Lerberghe and Philippe Talon who undertook the scholarly preparation of this ambitious project. They succeeded in securing the loan of several exceptional masterpieces from Syrian collections to Belgium. The exhibition was accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue featuring detailed descriptions of the objects and contributions from renowned international colleagues.linebreaklinebreakKarel took on administrative responsibilities at departmental level as well. He devoted considerable energy to securing research funding for Mesopotamian studies at KU Leuven and beyond, and had a special talent for bringing people, resources, and institutions together around projects that advanced the field.linebreaklinebreakFor Karel, research stays abroad were among the most stimulating aspects of his work as an Assyriologist. His contact with colleagues from all over the world, combined with his study of cuneiform materials in museum and university collections, continued to inspire him throughout his career and led to some of his most important publications. Collections in London (BM), Philadelphia (UPenn) and Ithaca (Cornell University), amongst others, played a significant role in this. In Trumansburg, near Ithaca (US), Karel and Gabriella even bought a house there for several years, simply to make it as easy as possible to study the Old Babylonian cuneiform collection at Cornell University during their research stays. Many researchers were welcomed there as guests during this period. He also had particularly fond memories of the time he collaborated on the CAD (Volume P), in Chicago.linebreaklinebreakWith the passing of Prof. Dr. Karel Van Lerberghe, Assyriology in general, and in Leuven in particular, has lost a scholar who, for decades, upheld and shaped the discipline at KU Leuven. His work lives on in the texts he unravelled, in the researchers he inspired and mentored, and in the Leuven Assyriological tradition that he shaped over the decades.linebreaklinebreakA list of Karel Van Lerberghe’s publications can be found at http://lirias.kuleuven.be/cv?Username=u0013922, and (until 2012) in Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 220 (pp. XVII-XXV).linebreaklinebreak~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~linebreakKathleen Abraham (KU Leuven), Anne Goddeeris (UGent); Elynn Gorris (UCLouvain), Hendrik Hameeuw (KU Leuven), Jan Tavernier (UCLouvain)linebreak