Margaret Cool Root  Margaret Cool Root is Professor of Near Eastern Art and Archaeology at the University of Michigan. She is an expert on the Achaemenid empire of ancient Persia and its interactions with Greece, and has published widely on Near Eastern material culture. Margaret Cool Root was educated at Bryn Mawr College, where she gained both her BA and PhD. She joined the faculty at the University of Michigan's Department of the History of Art in 1978, where she is also a curator at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. Her first major publication on the Achaemenid empire was the 1979 volume "The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art: Essays on the Creation of an Iconography of Empire" ("Acta Iranica" 9); this was a revised and expanded version of her doctoral thesis. In 1985 she was awarded a Fellowship of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She has also received support for her work from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Iran Heritage Foundation.