[2] She then went to Paris and attended Charles Fossey's course on ancient Babylon and Marcel Mauss' course on sociology.
[3] After the war Elena Cassin joined the French National Centre for Scientific Research as a specialist of Assyriology and of History of the Religions of the Ancient Near East.
[4] She herself dealt with Mesopotamia in the second half of the second millennium and thus with the Mitanni and Nuzi[2] and she also translated Sumerian into French.
[5] She participated with other colleagues committed to the left (Maxime Rodinson, Maurice Godelier, André-Georges Haudricourt, Charles Malamoud, Jean-Paul Brisson, Jean Yoyotte, Jean Bottero) in a Marxist think tank organised by Jean-Pierre Vernant.
This group took on an institutional form with the creation, in 1964, of the Centre des recherches comparées sur les sociétés anciennes, which later became the Centre Louis Gernet, focusing more on the study of ancient Greece.