Tali Farimah Farhadian was born in Teheran, Iran. She is a graduate of Yale College and the Yale Law School, where she was a member of the Middle East Legal Studies Seminar. She also has an M.Phil. from Oxford University, where she studied Modern Middle East Studies on a Rhodes Scholarship.

Archaeologists and village workmen excavating the Acropolis Temple (ca. 1800 BC) with its mud-brick column facade at Tell Leilan, Syria. The Yale University Tell Leilan Project, begun in 1978, has traced the history of north Mesopotamian societies and changing environments back to ca. 5000 BC.