Tom Hercules Davies

Tom Hercules Davies is Lecturer in Classics and Archaeology at the University of Melbourne. He is a comparative philologist: he studies the relationships between texts and languages from different parts of the ancient world. He works primarily with Greek, Akkadian, Egyptian, and the Indo-Iranian, Germanic, and Italic languages, focusing on the transmission of poetry, philosophy, and science among these traditions in the Bronze and Iron Ages. His work has appeared in Classical Quarterly, TAPA, Classical Philology, and other venues.

He grew up in Christchurch, New Zealand, and was educated at the University of Otago (BA Hons, 2014) and Princeton University (MA 2017, PhD 2021). He held postdoctoral appointments at Princeton University and Yale-NUS College, and from 2022–2024 was Seymour Reader in Ancient History and Philosophy at Ormond College. He is President of the Friends of Ancient Near Eastern Studies.