Mark Chavalas is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, where he has taught since 1989. Among his publications are the edited, Emar: The History, Religion, and Culture of a Syrian Town in the Late Bronze Age (1996), Mesopotamia and the Bible (2002), and The Ancient Near East: Historical Sources in Translation (2006), and he has had research fellowships at Yale, Harvard, Cornell, Cal-Berkeley, and a number of other universities. He has nine seasons of excavation at various Bronze Age sites in Syria, including Tell Ashara/Terqa and Tell Mozan/Urkesh.