The 2021 Balzan Prize for Art and Archaeology of the Ancient Near East

Milan, 2 February 2022 – The International Balzan Foundation announces that the working team composed of Giorgio Buccellati and Marilyn Kelly Buccellati has been awarded the 2021 Balzan Prize for Art and Archaeology of the Ancient Near East.

The prize, which was not announced on 13 September 2021 as the deliberations of the General Prize Committee Prize Committee, chaired by Prof. Luciano Maiani, were not completed, was awarded to them with the following motivation:
For their achievements in the study of Hurrian culture and for highlighting its importance as the foundation of a great urban civilization, among the most flourishing in the ancient Near East in the third millennium BCE; for promoting a digital approach to the study of archaeology; for enhancing theoretical reflection on the nature of this discipline.

The winners, both professors at the University of California, Los Angeles, will receive the prize on 1 July 2022 in Bern alongside the other 2021 Prizewinners:

• Saul Friedländer (Israel/USA), University of California, Los Angeles, for Holocaust and Genocide Studies;
• Jeffrey Gordon (USA), Washington University in St. Louis, for Microbiome in Health and Disease;
• the working group composed of Alessandra Buonanno (Italy/USA/Germany), Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, and Thibault Damour (France), Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, Paris, for Gravity: Physical and Astrophysical Aspects.