Lockwood Press Online

Written Middle Persian Literature under the Sasanids

2024-09-27T14:30:19+00:00

Current scholarship doubts that there was much, if any, written Middle Persian literature in the Sasanian Persian Kingdom (third to seventh century CE), but plentiful sources attest that such skepticism is unwarranted. Most Middle Persian written literary works from that time were lost because specific institutional and environmental conditions did not favor their survival—not because “ancient Iran” was an overwhelmingly “oral society” that rejected written literature.

Between Philology and Archaeology

2024-09-23T16:27:38+00:00

Edited by Natalia Bolatti Guzzo and Rita Francia

This volume celebrates the scientific and academic career of Massimiliano Marazzi, full professor of Aegean and Anatolian History and Philology at the University of Naples “Suor Orsola Benincasa.” His lifelong interest in the preclassical cultures of the Mediterranean is reflected in his intense research activity, carried out both as a philologist and as an archaeologist, with a special focus on the records of the Hittite world in both cuneiform and Anatolian hieroglyphic script. The present collection of essays, contributed by colleagues and friends, honors his scholarly contributions in the
domain of Anatolian and ancient Near Eastern studies.

Migration and Mobility in the Ancient Near East and Egypt

2024-09-11T15:36:21+00:00

Movement and mobility represent intertwined concepts that have persisted throughout human history. The act of moving from one place to another is, however, intricately tied to the challenges that hinder it. These obstacles can either be natural in origin or the product of human design aimed at constraining the movement of individuals or groups. Furthermore, movement and mobility can also manifest themselves within society, encompassing the fluid shifts of people within the social hierarchy and the transitions between various social groups. The transfer of words, technologies, and religious ideologies often accompanies these human movements. The region of ancient Western Asia and northeast Africa serves as a rich repository of evidence for these forms of movement and mobility, extensively documented through written sources and material culture. The essays collected in this volume variously examine the political dimensions of movement and mobility; how ideas, concepts, and languages move across boundaries; and the material evidence for cultural interactions.

Snake Identification in the Ancient Egyptian Brooklyn Medical Papyrus

2024-04-01T16:00:16+00:00

This book is about snakebite and snake identification in ancient Egypt. The authors—in a remarkable collaboration between the fields of Egyptology, medicine, herpetology, biology, and ecology—offer a new examination of the Brooklyn Medical Papyrus, better-known as the Snakebite Papyrus, a pragmatic medical treatise concerned with snake identification, snakebite, and treatment. Dating to sometime in the seventh through fourth centuries BCE, the document is the first-known structured treatise on snakebites from antiquity.

The preserved paragraphs name 24 snakes (and one chameleon), providing a brief description of the snake, sometimes its habits, the appearance of its bite, and the effects on the victim. The papyrus was intended to enable the ancient physician to identify the snake from the description given by the patient in order to give appropriate prognosis and treatment. As there was little effective treatment for snake bites in ancient Egypt, sometimes the physician resorted to magical incantations to invoke divine assistance.

The Snakebite Papyrus was first translated into French by Serge Sauneron and published posthumously in 1989. Major advances in fields such as biogeography, climate and niche modeling, and linguistics in the past thirty years have brought new perspectives. The authors provide a review of Sauneron’s and more recent studies and bring their own investigations, results, and comparisons to further clarify this remarkable historical document.

Babylonian Ceremonial Script in Its Scholarly Context

2024-04-01T19:52:18+00:00

Since the advent of Assyriology in the early nineteenth century it has been known that two distinct scripts were used in ancient Mesopotamian inscriptions and documents. One, usefully characterized as “cursive,” was used for the ephemeral documents of “daily life” as well as on most library and archival texts. The other was a deliberately archaizing script reserved for ceremonial use. This ceremonial script, of Babylonian origin, contained both archaic and archaizing signs, and was in productive use for over two millennia, not only in Babylonia but occasionally also in Assyria and beyond. Yet to date there has been no systematic study devoted specifically to this ceremonial script, nor any published syllabary of the archaic and archaizing signs it employs. This volume attempts to rectify this deficiency by providing a substantive introduction to Babylonian ceremonial script, along with a history of its modern study, and several case studies of how the script was actually used. The introduction is supplemented by an edition of the paleographic lists of the second and first millennia BCE, which contain pedagogical inventories of the archaic and archaizing cuneiform signs, illustrating how the ceremonial script was taught, learned and transmitted in scholarly contexts.

A View from the Herd

2024-03-21T16:13:18+00:00

In this book, the late Richard Redding synthesizes his decades-long work on the ancient agricultural economy of Egypt. Drawing on a diverse range of data, including zooarchaeology, ancient texts, and iconographic sources, he explores the role of cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs in the economic infrastructure of ancient, mainly pharaonic, Egypt and the complexities of decision-making processes that shaped the use and management of these vital livestock resources.

The book integrates zooarchaeological and historical data with information on unimproved breeds of cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs from Egypt and the broader Middle East as well as considers texts and tomb paintings. Redding argues that understanding the interplay between economic forces, environmental factors, and herders’ knowledge of animal characteristics is crucial for unraveling the dynamic nature of decision-making. The author explores herd growth rates, meat yields, caloric and nutritional benefits, and optimal herd structures. By employing that data and ecological models, including the annual Nile floods, he provides insights into the adaptive strategies employed by ancient Egyptian herders. In this way, Redding examines the economic rationale behind ancient Egyptian herding communities. His models of pharaonic herding strategies generate expectations tested using zooarchaeological evidence.

Redding long advocated the modeling approach he demonstrates here, understanding zooarchaeological data through a lens of animal biology and environmental context. This work should therefore spark wide interest among archaeologists working in disparate regions.

From New Haven to Nineveh and Beyond

2023-11-06T15:31:45+00:00

Over the course of three centuries, Yale has been actively and seriously engaged in Near Eastern learning, in both senses of the term—training students in the knowledge and skills needed to understand the languages and civilizations of the region, and supporting generations of scholars renowned for their erudition and pathbreaking research. From New Haven to Nineveh and Beyond traces the history of these endeavors through extensive use of unpublished archival materials, including letters, diaries, and records of institutional decisions. Developments at Yale are set against the wider background of changing American attitudes towards the Near East, as well as evolving ideas about the role of the academy and its curriculum in educating undergraduate and graduate students. Numerous illustrations, many of them previously unpublished, round out this vivid portrait of three centuries of Near Eastern learning at Yale.

Islamic Jurisprudence, Islamic Law, and Modernity

2023-11-01T17:33:29+00:00

Mohammad Fadel’s scholarship on Islamic law and legal history ranges from medieval institutions and the history of Islamic legal interpretation to urgent problems relating to the modern reception and re-assessment of Islamic legal doctrine. Fadel’s intellectual concerns focus primarily on the compatibility of the Islamic legal tradition with modern liberal political arrangements, but in his research and writing he also delves into the realm of premodern Islamic legal thought and institutions. His Rawlsian approach leads him to a political reading of the Islamic legal tradition, which he accomplishes by teasing out jurists’ assumptions about politics, economics, and the domestic sphere.

Fadel’s readings of Islamic legal sources suggest that Islamic law remains relevant to a society in which legitimate disagreements over law and morality seem intractable. At the same time, from the Rawlsian perspective he adopts, Fadel reminds us that premodern Muslim jurists formulated Islamic law also under conditions of substantial controversy over matters of law and morality, as well as over questions of religion, politics, theology, and metaphysics.

The studies gathered together in this volume adroitly illustrate Fadel’s interest in Islamic law as a domain of Islamic political thought and as a framework that might be deployed in today’s pluralistic and secularized societies.

From the Fields of Offerings

2023-08-15T17:49:34+00:00

This Memorial volume honors the life and work of Prof. Lanny David Bell (April 30, 1941–August 26, 2019), a leading scholar in Egyptology and a beloved teacher and colleague to so many. It includes a biography of Dr. Bell along with contributions from eminent scholars on the topics of ancient art, archaeology, religion, and philology.

Wonderful Things

2023-06-15T16:34:44+00:00

Just in time for the centennial of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, this volume of studies dedicated to the leading expert on the “boy king” brings together scholars from all over the world to celebrate the career of C. Nicholas Reeves. It includes a biography and bibliography of Reeves along with cutting-edge discussions of a wide variety of topics concentrating on New Kingdom Egypt and Tutankhamun.

Data Science, Human Science, and Ancient Gods

2023-06-08T17:44:43+00:00

The studies in this volume share a focus on religion in the ancient Mediterranean world: How ritual, myth, spectatorship, and travel reflect the continual interaction of human beings with the richly fictive beings who defined the boundaries of groups, access to the past, and mobility across land and seascapes. They share as well the methodological exploration of the intersection between human sciences—the integration of numerous disciplines around the study of all aspects of human life from the biological to the cultural—and the study of the past. In so doing, they continue a long dialogue that engages with critical models derived from specializations within history, philology, archaeology, sociology, and anthropology, and addresses, increasingly, the potentialities and pitfalls of quantitative and digital analyses. Many of the threads in this long conversation inform these chapters: the comparative project, human social evolution, disciplinary reflexivity, religion as an embedded, functional, and structural system, and the role for agency, networks, and materiality.

Ramesses II, Egypt's Ultimate Pharaoh

2022-09-20T15:46:15+00:00

Ramesses II was the most magnificent and iconic pharaoh in Egyptian history. His reign was the longest, the most "monumenta" in buildings and artwork, the most innovative in diplomacy, and even the most procreative, with over one hundred royal offspring. Drawing on the latest research, Peter J. Brand digs deep into Egyptian culture and archeology, revealing the mindset and motivations of Ramesses II. We find what his grand monuments reveal, and equally what they conceal. On the international scene, we peruse the diplomatic letters—often surprising, sometimes amusing—between Pharaoh and the kings of Babylon, Assyria, and the Hittite Empire. A courageous warrior in his prime, Ramesses was also a wise and visionary statesman. He ended six decades of war with the Hittite Empire by signing the first peace treaty in recorded history. In his later years Ramesses II became a living god, and finally an immortal legend. Forty years after Kenneth Kitchen's Pharaoh Triumphant, here at last is a fresh, engaging look at Ramesses II, Egypt's ultimate Pharaoh.

Endorsements:

"An evocative and up-to-date account of the life and times of the man whose shadow—for better or worse—had dominated the image of pharaonic kingship over three millennia."

–Aidan Dodson

“This book is not merely yet another foray into an attempted biography of a bygone ruler of the Nile Valley. Quite to the contrary, I believe that what Brand has achieved is a marvel. This scholarly work is a new stepping stone in the now two-full-centuries-long history of Egyptology not only owing to its in-depth critical approach, but also as Brand provides a perceptive secondary, or higher-level analysis of historical investigation. Brand’s volume is equally significant as it is a major advance in the field of Egyptology, especially in historical studies of the ancient world. He connects many sources together, all reflecting a disparate aspect and nature such as archaeology, inscriptions, visual panoramas and tableaux, not to mention “lowly” objects such as coffers or jewels and the like, into a coherent and stimulating whole. It is my firm position that Brand’s Ramesses II, Egypt’s Ultimate Pharaoh, will be seen not only as reconfirming the ruler’s importance in world history, but equally as a paradigm for historical studies of the ancient world. The book will become a milestone in historical writing on pharaonic Egypt.”

– Anthony Spalinger

"No Egyptian pharaoh had arguably as great an impact on Egypt than Ramesses II. Professor Peter Brand’s study provides more than a history of an eventful reign; it looks beyond the image of Ramesses as a great warrior and builder and puts him in a broader context of Egypt, the Levant, and Nubia. The narrative shows how Egypt’s place in the Late Bronze Age was maintained not just by war, but by judicious diplomacy as well. Especially interesting is the description of the negotiations between the Ramesses and the Hittite royal house that led to the peace treaty between the two empires in his twenty-first regnal year and the first diplomatic marriage to a Hittite princess in his thirty-fourth. Specialists and nonspecialists alike will welcome the balanced approach to the critical and controversial issues of his reign: a possible coregency with his father; the Battle of Kadesh; his complex family and many sons; the role of his queens and other royal women; Egyptian exploitation of Nubia and its gold mines; and, finally, his legacy in Egyptian and world history. The even-handed presentation allows a general readership to follow critical issues of the reign, while providing endnotes and an extensive bibliography that add solid scholarly support to discussions. A generous number of illustrations and maps are well deployed and particularly helpful in describing the ambitious building program throughout Egypt and Nubia that marked Ramesses’s reign."

– Ogden Goelet

Weseretkau “Mighty of Kas”

2023-03-23T15:30:09+00:00

Weseretkau “Mighty of Kas” honors the life and career of Professor Cathleen “Candy” Keller, a truly extraordinary teacher, scholar, Egyptologist, and polymath. The contributors to this volume were Professor Keller’s students, friends, and colleagues. Though much of the research presented here centers around the honoree’s two primary passions—Egyptian art and the study of the village of Deir el-Medina—the range of topics reflects her broad Egyptological interests, including religious organization, artistic technique, museum collections, textual analyses, historical events, and archaeological studies at sites throughout Egypt.

Esarhaddon, King of Assyria

2023-02-08T18:03:58+00:00

Esarhaddon, King of Assyria continues Josette Elayi’s narrative journey through the lives of the kings of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Using both archaeological and textual evidence, Elayi examines the contentious circumstances surrounding Esarhaddon’s accession to the throne in 681 BCE, his rebuilding of Babylon, which had been destroyed by his father Sennacherib, his successful campaigns in Media, the Arabian Peninsula, Anatolia, the Caucasus, and the Levant, and his ultimate achievement, the conquest of Egypt in 671 BCE. Throughout, Elayi presents a rich portrait of this enigmatic figure, whose short but impactful reign was plagued by chronic illness and a complex—and ultimately fatal—relationship with his court officials. Yet, through it all, Esarhaddon emerges as one of the most scholarly and most politically successful kings of the empire.

Destruction and Its Impact on Ancient Societies at the End of the Bronze Age

2023-01-18T20:41:15+00:00

This volume offers a groundbreaking reassessment of the destructions that allegedly occurred at sites across the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Late Bronze Age, and challenges the numerous grand theories that have been put forward to account for them. The author demonstrates that earthquakes, warfare, and destruction all played a much smaller role in this period than the literature of the past several decades has claimed, and makes the case that the end of the Late Bronze Age was a far less dramatic and more protracted process than is generally believed.

Reviews:

Destruction and Its Impact throws up an important point for the study of any collapse, which is the necessity of first identifying and describing what we are seeking to explain; this in itself is not straightforward.… By going back to original reports and tracing citation chains back from claimed destructions, the book clearly shows that the dominant narrative of "the collapse c. 1200 BC" is at least in part a modern myth and an artefact of scholarship. This view must be addressed by those who propose sweeping explanations of collapse.—Guy D. Middleton in Antiquity 98.397 (2024): 261 https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2023.187

Salvage Excavations at Tel Qashish (Tell Qasis) and Tell el-Wa’er (2010–2013)

2023-01-17T19:27:38+00:00

This volume brings together the final reports of salvage excavations carried out in the vicinity of Tel Qashish in the northern Jezreel Valley, Israel, from 2010 to 2013. These include the Middle and Epipaleolithic flint workshops at Tel Qashish West and Tel Qashish South, the early Early Bronze Age I settlement at Tell el-Wa‘er, the late Early Bronze Age I features and the Late Bronze Age II cultic repository at Tel Qashish, as well as some early Roman remains. Twenty-nine chapters by twenty-five authors present the context, stratigraphy, finds, and analyses of these four major aspects of the excavations.

A Sanctuary in the Hora of Illyrian Apollonia

2022-12-19T17:33:54+00:00

In the years 2004–2006, a joint team from the International Centre for Albanian Archaeology in Tirana, Albania, the Institute of Archaeology in Tirana, and the University of Cincinnati conducted excavations in the plain west of the walls of the ancient Greek colony of Apollonia, a short distance to the southwest of the modern village of Pojan. The site lies almost entirely within a complex of farm buildings known locally as Bonjakët. This volume represents the full publication of the results of three campaigns of excavation at the site. The new excavations discovered and documented a previously unknown monumental temple and have made it possible to describe for the first time the material remains of Greek rituals as practiced at the time of, or not long after, the foundation of Apollonia.

Ancient Egyptian Prisoner Statues: Fragments of the Late Old Kingdom

2022-08-29T16:33:11+00:00

Catalogue of statue fragments examined in Ancient Egyptian Prisoner Statues.

Ancient Egyptian Prisoner Statues-the first comprehensive analysis of the prisoner statues-addresses this gap, demonstrating that the Egyptians conceived of and used the prisoner statues differently over time as a response to contemporary social, cultural, and historical changes. In the process, the author contributes new data and interpretations on topics as diverse as the purpose and function of the pyramid complex, the ways in which the Egyptians understood and depicted ethnicity, and the agency of artists in ancient Egypt. Ultimately, this volume provides a fuller understanding of not only the prisoner statues but also the Egyptian late Old Kingdom as a whole.

One Who Loves Knowledge

2022-08-10T15:27:04+00:00

The thirty-nine articles in this volume, One Who Loves Knowledge, have been contributed by colleagues, students, friends, and family in honor of Richard Jasnow, professor of Egyptology at Johns Hopkins University. Despite his claiming to be "just a demoticist," Richard Jasnow's research interests and specialties are broad, spanning religious and historical topics, along with new editions of demotic texts, including most particularly the Book of Thoth. A number of the authors demonstrate their appreciation for Jasnow's contributions to the understanding of this difficult text. The volume also includes other studies on literature, Ptolemaic history, and even the god Thoth himself, and features detailed images and abundant hieroglyphic, hieratic, demotic, Coptic, and Greek texts.

Ancient Egyptian Prisoner Statues

2022-07-06T18:35:08+00:00

During the Old Kingdom, the ancient Egyptians constructed elaborately decorated mortuary monuments for their pharaohs. By the late Old Kingdom (ca. 2435-2153 BCE), these pyramid complexes began to contain a new and unique type of statue, the so-called prisoner statues. Despite being known to Egyptologists for decades, these statues of kneeling, bound foreign captives have been only partially documented, and questions surrounding their use, treatment, and exact meaning have remained unanswered. Ancient Egyptian Prisoner Statues-the first comprehensive analysis of the prisoner statues-addresses this gap, demonstrating that the Egyptians conceived of and used the prisoner statues differently over time as a response to contemporary social, cultural, and historical changes. In the process, the author contributes new data and interpretations on topics as diverse as the purpose and function of the pyramid complex, the ways in which the Egyptians understood and depicted ethnicity, and the agency of artists in ancient Egypt. Ultimately, this volume provides a fuller understanding of not only the prisoner statues but also the Egyptian late Old Kingdom as a whole.

A catalogue of the fragments examined is available here (Open Access).

Cattle and People

2022-06-14T14:40:56+00:00

This volume originates in a conference session that took place at the 2018 International Council of Archaeozoology conference in Ankara, Turkey, entitled "Humans and Cattle: Interdisciplinary Perspectives to an Ancient Relationship." The aim of the session was to bring together zooarchaeologists and their colleagues from various other research fields working on human cattle interactions over time. The contributions in this volume reflect well the breadth of work being undertaken on the ancient relationship between humans and cattle across the continents of Europe, Africa and Asia, and from the late Pleistocene to postmedieval period. Almost all involve the study of archaeological cattle remains and use different zooarchaeological methods, but the combination of these approaches with that of ethnography, isotopes and genetics is also featured.

Podcast interview with the author on Knowing Animals

The Temple of Ramesses II in Abydos Volume 3

2022-05-25T19:27:54+00:00

Of all the enormous monuments throughout Egypt and Nubia that Ramesses II (the Great; ca. 1279–1212 BCE) left behind, his temple at Abydos, built early in his reign, stands as one of his most elegant, with its simple architectural layout and dramatic and graceful painted relief scenes. Though best known for its dramatic reliefs depicting the battle of Kadesh, the temple also offers a wealth of information about religious and social life in ancient Egypt. It reflects, for example, the strenuous efforts of the early Ramessides to reestablish the Osiris cult in Egypt—and particularly at Abydos—in the aftermath of the Amarna period.

Building on the comprehensive photographic and epigraphic documentation of the temple presented in The Temple of Ramesses II at Abydos volumes 1 (Wall Scenes) and 2 (Pillars, Niches, and Miscellanea), volume 3 (Architectural and Inscriptional Features) offers a detailed analysis of the overall architectural layout and decorative program of the temple and its symbolism. This discussion approaches the religious history of the site through its archaeology, its inscriptions—both planned and secondary (graffiti)—and its situation in the complex religious landscape of Abydos. Of particular interest are the temple’s role as a staging point for the great Osiris Festival and its procession, among the most important of all ritual events in the Egyptian religious calendar during the Ramesside period; the promotion of an active, unbound form of Osiris; and the evidence for important cult activities that took place on the rooftop of the temple, the presence of which is documented today by the staircase that accessed it from Court B.

The SŌUSHÉN HÒUJÌ

2022-05-24T16:08:00+00:00

The Sōushén hòujì 搜神後記 (Latter Notes on Collected Spirit Phenomena), attributed to the celebrated poet Táo Qián 陶潛 (365-427), is a compilation of anecdotes and stories known as zhìguài 志怪 ('records of the anomalous') that document strange and unusual phenomena the author observed in his lifetime. Intended to serve as a sequel to Gān Bǎo's 干寳 (d. 336) Sōushénjì 搜神記 (Collected Spirit Phenomena), the original text was lost but was reconstructed in the late Míng dynasty. This volume presents an annotated translation of the entire Míng version of the Sōushén hòujì as well as of an additional set of surviving stories that were identified and restored to the text by the modern scholar Lǐ Jiànguó 李劍國. The book also includes a history of the Sōushén hòujì text, an examination of its linguistic style and characteristics, a discussion of the historical nature of its contents and how it fits into the zhìguài genre, providing a window onto medieval Chinese society and culture, and a brief overview of recent zhìguài scholarship to guide readers who hope to continue their exploration of the genre.

The Restoration of Sunnism

2022-04-07T16:25:49+00:00

The Restoration of Sunnism is a study of the early history of Islamic law schools (s. madrasa, pl. madāris) and their professors in late Fāṭimid and Aiyūbid Egypt (495–647/1101–1249). It describes the origin and spread of these institutions, their teachers, and their role in the religious life of Egypt. This work is a lightly revised version of the author’s 1976 University of Pennsylvania doctoral dissertation, which remains one of the most important works on the history of the premodern institution of the madrasa to date. Unlike many publications on the madāris in recent decades, which argue that medieval Islamic legal education was informal and lacked structure, the present work endeavors to detect the elements of structure and order in the institution of the madrasa and in its educational curricula and the practices associated with it. Leiser’s ground-breaking work stands out for its attention to detail and to the political, economic, and religious background of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Egypt.

A Journey through the Beyond

2022-03-22T18:43:19+00:00

This volume offers the first comprehensive overview of the evolution over time of a foundational concept of the Egyptian afterlife beliefs, the Duat, or netherworld. The Duat is a complicated, multifaceted notion, which was never canonized into a single version of the beyond, but offered instead a variety of alternatives attempting to describe the metaphysical realms beyond the visible world, and beyond life. Theological speculations gave rise to a rich textual and visual repertoire, which underwent a process of evolution over thousands of years, during which newer ideas and images were constantly introduced. Through the analysis of royal and non-royal funerary texts from the late Old Kingdom to the end of the New Kingdom, this book traces the development of the conceptualization of the notion of Duat, outlining what it encompassed and where it was imagined to be located. In addition to the translation and discussion of the most significant passages of the texts analyzed, each chapter also provides an overview of the individual compositions and of the relevant theological, cosmological, and astronomical notions complementing the conceptual framework, of which the Duat formed but a part. Additionally, discussions of concurrent changes in Egyptian culture, society, and ideology are included in order to clarify the context in which afterlife beliefs and related texts evolved. An analysis of the correlation between funerary compositions and their material supports complements the study, emphasizing the Egyptians' belief in a magical synergy between texts, images, and their contexts in the activation of a suitable, effective afterlife for the recipients of the texts.

KEOS 12

2022-03-18T16:55:46+00:00

Area B, in the southeastern part of the Bronze Age town of Ayia Irini, Kea, preserves evidence for human activity from the mid-Early Bronze Age to the mid-Late Bronze Age, or Periods III–VII in the parlance of the site. This volume summarizes the results of excavation in the area and provides an overview of the stratigraphy, architecture, and artifacts found in it. Owing to its status as one of the best-excavated and best-documented sectors of the site, Area B also provides an excellent opportunity to consider diachronic changes in the ceramic assemblage through time. Analysis of macroscopic and petrographic fabrics and evaluation of how fabric, ware, and shape categories intersect enables a detailed, diachronic study of changes in pottery production, trade, and consumption patterns at the site in view of broader shifts in Aegean economy and society.

Archaeozoology of Southwest Asia and Adjacent Areas XIII

2022-03-08T19:08:33+00:00

Southwest Asia is at the epicenter of zooarchaeological research on pivotal changes in human history such as animal domestication and the emergence of social complexity. This volume continues the long tradition of the ASWA conference series in publishing new research results in the zooarchaeology of southwest Asia and adjacent areas. The book is organized in three thematic areas. The first presents new methodological tools and approaches in the study of animal remains exemplified through studies on domestication, butchery practices, microdebris, intrasite contextual comparisons and age-at-death recording. Besides offering interesting insights into our past, these methodological developments enable higher resolution for future research. The second section focuses on the subsistence economies of prehistoric and early complex societies and provides new insights into how animal management developed in southwest Asia. The third section includes intriguing new research results on the roles of animals in the symbolic world of ancient societies, such as the meaning of insect figures at Göbekli Tepe, animal cults in Egypt, feasting in Iron Age Oman, and the ornithological interpretation of Byzantine mosaics.

Purifying a House from Blood

2022-02-21T20:05:11+00:00

The Hittite ritual for the Ancient Gods (CTH 446) is one of the most interesting and complex in the Hittite ritual corpus. It describes a series of ritual procedures and recitations to be performed over two days with the goal of cleansing a house contaminated by impurity resulting from bloodshed. Summoned for the task are the Ancient Gods, Netherworld deities of the Hurrian-Hittite tradition. The present study provides an updated critical edition of this remarkable ritual, which is complemented with philological notes and commentary. Additionally, the volume investigates the nature and origins of the composition against the broader background of the Hittite ritual corpus.

Essays on Three Iranian Language Groups

2021-12-23T17:16:58+00:00

This volume studies three West Iranian language groups that are either undefined or have been scantly analyzed. The first chapter, "The Languages of Taleqan and Alamut," studies nineteen kindred language varieties spoken in the Sāhrud basin in central-western Alborz; the second, "Biābānaki Language Group," studies the vernaculars spoken in four villages in the historical district of Biābānak, located on the southern edge of the Great Desert in central Persia; while the third, "The Komisenian Sprachbund," treats seven languages spoken in and around Semnan, located halfway between Tehran and Khorasan. Each chapter addresses phonology, morphosyntax, and lexis, following the areal typological approach developed for West Iranian by Donald Stilo. This approach is complemented for the Biabanaki and Komisenian groups by the longstanding historical-comparative method. Special attention is given to ethnolinguistics and the language contact phenomenon, as well as the historical geography of each region.

On the Path to the Place of Rest

2021-12-16T15:57:53+00:00

In this volume Christina Di Cerbo and Richard Jasnow publish 92 Demotic graffiti, along with several ostraca and mummy bandages, from Theban Tombs 11, 12, Tomb-399-, and environs recorded and studied under the aegis of the Spanish Mission at Dra Abu el-Naga directed by José Galán. These texts from the mid-second century BCE were inscribed on the tomb walls by workers of the Ibis and Falcon cult, who used the New Kingdom tombs as burial places for mummified birds dedicated to the gods Thoth and Horus. This varied corpus of texts includes not only votive formulae and lists of names, but, most unusually, labels for chambers and halls to guide the men depositing the mummies through the labyrinthine catacombs. The cult workers also recorded important burials and memorialized events of special significance, as when a massive conflagration broke out that consumed several mummies and damaged the tomb walls. The Missions conservators recovered many hitherto virtually invisible graffiti. Numerous inscriptions posed daunting epigraphic challenges; the text editors employed computer applications, especially DStretch, in order to enhance the digital images forming the basis for decipherment. In an introductory chapter Galán discusses the work of the Spanish Mission at Dra Abu Naga and recounts the complicated history of this important area of the Theban Necropolis down to the Roman period. The graffiti illustrate how New Kingdom tombs were reused for the sacred animal cult in the Ptolemaic period. Francisco Bosch-Puche and Salima Ikram contribute a detailed chapter analyzing the archaeological context of the graffiti and the material evidence for the animal cult in the site. The volume, a holistic study of this area at the twilight of Pharaonic history, represents a true collaboration between archaeologists and philologists.

The Temple of Ramesses II in Abydos Volume 2

2021-10-29T14:33:01+00:00

Of all the enormous monuments throughout Egypt and Nubia that Ramesses II (the Great; ca. 1279–1212 BCE) left behind, his temple at Abydos, built early in his reign, stands as one of his most elegant monuments, with its simple architectural layout and dramatic and graceful painted relief scenes. Though best known for its dramatic reliefs depicting the battle of Kadesh, the temple also offers a wealth of information about religious and social life in ancient Egypt. It reflects, for example, the strenuous efforts of the early Ramessides to reestablish the Osiris cult in Egypt—and particularly at Abydos—in the aftermath of the Amarna period.

Over a seven-year period, the authors of The Temple of Ramesses II in Abydos conducted a field project with the aim of producing an up-to-date and comprehensive architectural, photographic, and epigraphic record of the temple. This lavish volume, This lavish volume, the second of two documenting their results, presents miscellaneous elements of the temple, including the pillars, as well as translations of the inscriptions found in the temple. Volume 1, "Wall Scenes," (available here) contains more than two hundred detailed line drawings—accurately rendered according to modern epigraphical standards—of the temple's carved relief scenes, placed alongside their corresponding full-color photographs. The result is a masterpiece of modern epigraphic research and publication.

The Classical Legacy of Gilbert Highet

2021-07-26T15:50:56+00:00

Gilbert Highet (1906-1978) was one of Columbia University's greatest teachers and in his day the most celebrated classical scholar in America. One may regard his life and career as both extraordinary and controversial. Now, over forty years after his death, a fresh retrospect seems appropriate, as a way of presenting new information about him and evaluating his enduring classical legacy for the twenty-first century reader. This fully documented biographical appreciation of Highet's life and work, capped by fully updated bibliographies of publications by him and about him, offers a long-overdue "official life" of this unique and towering figure.

Reviews:

"Ball's reviews of Highet's labors on Juvenal, satire and Vergil are annotated heavily. Ball is impartial in presenting the critical observations of those classicists who disapproved of or questioned Highet's biographical approach to Juvenal.… As a classicist and as the biographer, Ball's judgments are authoritative.… Errors in fact are corrected throughout by Ball. He is up to date on all aspects of material on or by Highet. He does not fail to notice the remarks of critics of Highet's scholarly works.… This assessment of him is a helpful contribution to the history of classical scholarship in America."—Darrell Sutton in The Quarterly Review (2021)

The Poetics of Adonis and Yves Bonnefoy

2021-07-26T14:10:27+00:00

This book examines the work of two major poets who wrote in the second half of the twentieth century, Yves Bonnefoy of France and the Syrian-born Adonis (born Ali Ahmed Saïd). In conducting close readings of key moments from their respective poetry, the author illustrates how both of these writers, in their own unique ways, construct poetry as a form of spiritual practice, that is, as a way of transforming both the poet’s and the implied reader’s ontological, perceptual, and creative relationships with their internal and external worlds.

His Good Name

2021-03-22T17:04:58+00:00

The wish to affiliate with a specific cultural, social, or ethnical group is as important today as it was in past societies, such as that of the ancient Egyptians. The same significance applies to the self-presentation of an individual within such a group. Although it is inevitable that we perceive ancient cultures through the lens of our time, place, and value systems, we can certainly try to look beyond these limitations. Questions of how the ancient Egyptians saw themselves and how individuals tried to establish and thus present themselves in society are central pieces of the puzzle of how we interpret this ancient culture. This volume focuses on the topic of identity and self-presentation, tackling the subject from many different angles: the ways in which social and personal identities are constructed and maintained; the manipulations of culture by individuals to reflect real or aspirational identities; and the methods modern scholars use to attempt to say something about ancient persons. Building on the work of Ronald J. Leprohon, to whom this volume is dedicated, contributions in this volume present an overview of our current state of understanding of patterns of identity and self-presentation in ancient Egypt. The contributions approach various aspects of identity and self-presentation through studies of gender, literature, material culture, mythology, names, and officialdom.

Beowulf & Beyond

2021-02-03T18:04:53+00:00

Beowulf & Beyond is the first and only poetic translation to include not only Beowulf but all the best-known works of Anglo-Saxon literature in one convenient volume. Previously, students have had to buy a separate book to read essential works like "The Seafarer," required reading in all courses of early English literature. And even these may miss some of the greatest delights of this period: the wonderful stories from Bede, the charms, sayings, spells and riddles that inspire students to delve deeper into this strange and magical world. These translations, which derive their power from cleaving "close to the bone" of the original Anglo-Saxon, capture the power and punch of the original in a supple verse that sweeps the reader onward irresistibly.

The Woman in the Pith Helmet

2021-01-14T18:26:00+00:00

This volume celebrates the career of Norma Franklin, an archaeologist who has made important contributions to our understanding of the three key cities of Samaria, Megiddo, and Jezreel in the Northern Kingdom of Israel during the Iron Age. The sixteen essays offered herein by Franklin’s colleagues in archaeology and biblical studies are a fitting tribute to the woman in the pith helmet: an indomitable field archaeologist who describes herself as “happiest with complex stratigraphy” and dedicated to “killing sacred cows.”

Sargonic and Pre-Sargonic Cuneiform Texts in the Yale Babylonian Collection

2020-08-10T02:35:07+00:00

This volume publishes hand copies of 292 cuneiform texts in the Yale Babylonian Collection dating to the Sargonic and Pre-Sargonic periods. It continues publication of the Pre-Ur III texts begun by George Hackman and Ferris Stephens in the series Babylonian lnscriptions in the Collection of J. B. Nies, volume 8. The tablet copies presented here include accounts and records from Isin, Nippur, Shuruppak, Umma, Zabala, Girsu, Umma, Lagash, Eshnunna, and Kish, as well as the Mesag archive.

Ancient Egyptian Biographies

2021-01-13T18:21:25+00:00

(Auto-)biography is a genre of ancient Egyptian written discourse that was central to high culture from its earliest periods. Belonging to the nonroyal elites, these texts present aspects of individual lives and experience, sometimes as narratives of key events, sometimes as characterizations of personal qualities. Egyptian (auto-) biographies offer a unique opportunity to examine the ways in which individuals fashioned distinctive selves for display and the significance of the physical, religious, and social contexts they selected. The present volume brings together specialists from a range of relevant periods, approaches, and interests. The studies collected here examine Egyptian (auto-)biographies from a variety of complementary perspectives: (1) anthropological and contrastive perspectives; (2) the original Old Kingdom settings; (3) text format and language; (4) social dimensions; and (5) religious experience.

Arabic Belles Lettres

2021-01-13T18:22:26+00:00

Arabic Belles Lettres brings together ten studies that shed light on important questions in the study of Arabic language, literature, literary history, and writerly culture. The volume is divided into three sections. Early Narratives comprises: Joseph Lowry on the Qur'an’s allusive legal language; Abed el-Rahman Tayyara on matrilineal lineages in the context of Badr and Uhud; Ruqayya Khan on the ramifications of public courtship in 'Udhrī romances; and Philip Kennedy on firāsah (reading for signs and traces) in medieval narrative. Medieval Authors comprises: Shawkat Toorawa on ͑Ubaydallāh ibn Ahmad ibn Abī Tāhir’s History of Baghdād; Maurice Pomerantz and Bilal Orfali on Ibn Fāris and the origins of the maqāmah genre; Everett Rowson on al-Tawhīdī and his predecessors; and Ghayde Ghraowi on al-Khafājī and his Rayhānat al-alibbā'. Modern Egypt comprises: Roger Allen on a cultural controversy in the Cairo newspapers of 1902; and Devin Stewart on preposterous boasting and ingenuity in modern Egyptian Arabic. This illuminating collection is a must read for anyone interested in Arabic literature.

Receptions of the Ancient Near East in Popular Culture and Beyond

2020-11-07T01:55:28+00:00

This book is an enthusiastic celebration of the ways in which popular culture has consumed aspects of the ancient Near East to construct new realities. The editors have brought together an impressive line-up of scholars-archaeologists, philologists, historians, and art historians-to reflect on how objects, ideas, and interpretations of the ancient Near East have been remembered, constructed, reimagined, mythologized, or indeed forgotten within our shared cultural memories. The exploration of cultural memories has revealed how they inform the values, structures, and daily life of societies over time. This is therefore not a collection of essays about the deep past but rather about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Religious Convergence in the Ancient Mediterranean

2020-11-07T04:09:51+00:00

This volume brings together scholars in religion, archaeology, philology, and history to explore case studies and theoretical models of converging religions. The twenty-four essays presented, which derive from Hittite, Cilician, Lydian, Phoenician, Greek, and Roman cultural settings, focus on encounters at the boundaries of cultures, landscapes, chronologies, social class and status, the imaginary, and the materially operative. Broad patterns ultimately emerge that reach across these boundaries, and suggest the state of the question on the study of convergence, and the potential fruitfulness for comparative and interdisciplinary studies as models continue to evolve.

Concluding the Neolithic

2021-01-13T18:29:06+00:00

The second half of the seventh millennium BC saw the demise of the previously affluent and dynamic Neolithic way of life. The period is marked by significant social and economic transformations of local communities, as manifested in a new spatial organization, patterns of architecture, burial practices, and in chipped stone and pottery manufacture. This volume has three foci. The first concerns the character of these changes in different parts of the Near East with a view to placing them in a broader comparative perspective. The second concerns the social and ideological changes that took place at the end of Neolithic and the beginning of the Chalcolithic that help to explain the disintegration of constitutive principles binding the large centers, the emergence of a new social system, as well as the consequences of this process for the development of full-fledged farming communities in the region and beyond. The third concerns changes in lifeways: subsistence strategies, exploitation of the environment, and, in particular, modes of procurement, consumption, and distribution of different resources.

The Hittite Gilgamesh

2021-01-08T18:21:26+00:00

From the late third millennium BCE on, the adventures of the hero Gilgamesh were well known throughout Babylonia and Assyria, and the discovery of Akkadian-language fragments of versions of his tale at Boğazköy, Ugarit, Emar, and Megiddo demonstrates that tales of the hero's exploits had reached the periphery of the cuneiform world already in the Late Bronze Age. A century of excavation at the Hittite capital of Hattusa (mod. Boğazköy) has yielded more textual sources for Gilgamesh than are known from all other Late Bronze Age sites combined. The Gilgamesh tradition was imported to Hattusa for use in scribal instruction, and has been of particular importance to modern scholars in reconstructing the epic and analyzing its development, since it documents a period in the history of the narrative for which very few textual witnesses have yet been recovered from Mesopotamia itself. And it is this very Middle Babylonian period to which scholarly consensus assigns the composition of the final, "canonical" version of the epic. The Hittite Gilgamesh offers a full edition of the manuscripts from Hattusa in the Hittite, Akkadian, and Hurrian languages recounting Gilgamesh's adventures.

"A necessary place to start with the investigation of what reading Gilgameš in Hattuša meant is Gary Beckman’s much welcomed book The Hittite Gilgamesh.… It is heartening to see that a devoted study of many years by an individual scholar published in book form cannot be outdone by an online edition of the Hittite texts.… With Beckman’s study a new vista opens for exploring how the Epic travelled to the western ends of the Cuneiform world, more than one-thousand miles away from Babylonia, and what happened to it once it arrived there. His book on Gilgameš sits nicely on the shelf…"—Yoram Cohen, Tel Aviv University, Bibliotheca Orientalis 78 (2021): 166–72

Muslim Perceptions and Receptions of the Bible

2019-10-25T20:47:08+00:00

The articles brought together in this volume deal with Muslim perceptions and uses of the Bible in its wider sense, including the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament as well as the New Testament, albeit with an emphasis on the former scripture. While Muslims consider the earlier revelations to the People of the Book to have been altered to some extent by the Jews and the Christians and abrogated by the Qurʾān, God's final dispensation to humankind, the Bible is at the same time venerated in view of its divine origin, and questioning this divine origin is tantamount to unbelief. Muslim scholars approached and used the Bible for a variety of purposes and in different ways. Thus Muslim historians regularly relied on biblical materials as their primary source for the pre-Islamic period when discussing the creation as well as the history of the Israelites and the prophets preceding Muḥammad. Authors seeking to polemicize against Jews and Christians were primarily interested in the presumed biblical annunciations of Muḥammad and his religion and / or in perceived contradictions and cases of internal abrogation in the Bible. These various concerns resulted from and had an impact on the ways in which Muslim authors accessed the scriptures.

Reviews:

"This collection … shows that Adang’s and Schmidtke’s work is still fresh and crucial for the ongoing conversation on Jewish–Muslim relations. The first three chapters are surveys that provide the reader with sufficient background material on the ‘Torah’ in the Qur’an and early traditional Muslim views of the ‘corruption’ (taḥrīf) of the Hebrew Bible and of Judaism itself. These chapters would offer graduate students a sound guide for entry into this field. An extensive and impressive bibliography of all the works previously listed in the individual articles has been assembled with both primary and secondary sources, providing researchers with an excellent resource to begin or continue their own work in this field."—David D. Grafton, Hartford International University, in Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations 33:2, 193–195; DOI: 10.1080/09596410.2022.2038957.

New Trends in Qur’anic Studies

2020-11-06T21:59:09+00:00

The essays in this volume discuss recent trends and issues in the scholarly study of the Qur’ān and its exegesis. The last few years have witnessed an unprecedented development in qur'anic studies in terms of both the number of volumes that have been produced and the wide range of issues covered. It is not an exaggeration to say that the field of qur'anic studies today has become the 'crown' of Islamic studies. In this book, scholars of diverse approaches critically engage with the Qur’ān and its exegesis, including questions about the milieu in which the Qur’ān emerged, the Qur’ān's relation to the biblical tradition, its chronology, textual integrity, and its literary features. In addition, this volume addresses recent scholarship on tafsīr (qur'anic exegesis), including thematic interpretation, diacronic and syncronic readings of the Qur’ān. Various approaches to understanding the Muslim scripture with or without tafsīr are also discussed.

Sargonic Texts from Telloh in the Istanbul Archaeological Museums

2019-10-25T21:13:39+00:00

This volume continues publication of the Sargonic tablets from Telloh in the Istanbul Archeological Museums begun with STTI in 1982. Presenting transliterations of 693 texts from this site, it represents a further step towards meaningful engagement with the Sargonic records from Girsu.

Rain-Giver, Bone-Breaker, Score-Settler

2019-10-18T12:23:05+00:00

Just as quranic scholars have over the last decade honed their facility in utilizing Syriac literature, so the field stands in need of relearning to use poetic material as a valid, albeit in some respects recalcitrant, resource for the Quran’s historical contextualization. The present essay is an attempt to contribute to this by reassessing how poetry, and more briefly the epigraphic record, can help us reconstruct pre-quranic Arabian notions of the deity whose name is allāh. After some reflections on the relationship between the word allāh and the expression al-ilāh, “the god” or “the deity,” the essay succinctly examines what we can learn about Allāh’s status and functions from our chronologically earliest sources—Ancient North Arabian inscriptions—which are conventionally, though uncertainly, estimated to take us up to ca. 400 CE. Allāh’s relative lack of prominence in the epigraphic record is thrown into particular relief when juxtaposed with the beliefs about Allāh that the Quran ascribes to its pagan opponents. The study then turns to evidence from pre-quranic poetry, which in many respects aligns with the beliefs about Allāh that were held by the Quran’s pagan adversaries. Such mutual corroboration confirms that the poetic record does in fact provide us with nonanachronistic insights into pre-quranic notions of Allāh. The concluding section considers the historical context that may help us explain Allāh’s significant surge in prominence between the Ancient North Arabian inscriptions, on the one hand, and the poetic record and the Quran, on the other.

Selected Studies in Modern Arabic Narrative: History, Genre, Translation

2020-11-07T17:29:37+00:00

No Western scholar has contributed as much to the study of modern Arabic narrative as has Roger Allen. His doctoral dissertation was the very first Oxford D.Phil. in modern Arabic literature, completed in 1968 under the supervision of Mustafa Badawi. That same year, he took a position in Arabic language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania, the oldest professorial post in Arabic in the United States. Roger Allen has been phenomenally prolific: fifty books and translations, two hundred articles and counting—on Arabic language pedagogy, on translation, on Arabic literary history, criticism and literature. He is also one of the most decorated and acclaimed translators of Arabic literature. The present volume brings together sixteen of Roger Allen’s articles on modern Arabic narrative, with a focus on genre, translation, and literary history, and features analyses of the works of Rashid Abu Jadrah, Bensalem Himmich, Yusuf Idris, Naguib Mahfouz, and Tayeb Salih.

A Qur’ānic Apocalypse

2021-01-08T18:20:33+00:00

The present volume closes a trilogy devoted to the exegesis of the Qur'ān analyzed according to the principles of Semitic rhetoric, a method of textual analysis developed in the field of biblical studies. It studies the shortest sūrahs of the Qur'ān, which are traditionally dated to the beginnings of the preaching of Muhammad in Mecca. The reference to the initial vision of Muhammad in Sūrah 81, the point of departure for his career as Prophet, provides the starting point of the study of this group of sūrahs. The analysis shows that the redactors who assembled the textual fragments of the Qur'ān into a book were guided by precise intentions. In the end, it is these intentions that the rhetorical analysis of the text enables us to discover and better understand.

The History of Phoenicia

2021-01-13T18:33:44+00:00

The history of the Phoenicians, explorers and merchants, is little known. What a paradox for this ingenious people, who invented the alphabet, to have left so few written traces of their existence. Their literature, recorded on papyrus, has disappeared. And yet this civilization fired the imagination of its contemporarie—the Jews in particular—inspiring terror among the Romans and Greeks, who depicted them as a cruel people who practiced human sacrifice. Their clients were the pharaohs and the Assyrians, their ships criss-crossed the Mediterranean, laden with the luxuries of the day such as wine, oil, grain, and mineral ore. Buried beneath the modern cities of Lebanon, ancient Phoenicia is resuscitated in this volume.

Josette Elayi is a historian and researcher with degrees in Hebrew, Aramaic,and Akkadian, and an unrivaled expert on Phoenicia. She has taught at the Lebanese University in Beirut and Mustansiriye University in Baghdad and currently continues her research in Paris at the Collège de France. She has developed a new pluridisciplinary historical method combining epigraphy, numismatics, archaeology, economics, and sociology.

A History of the Encyclopaedia of Islam

2021-01-08T18:20:07+00:00

The first two editions of the Encyclopaedia of Islam remain the leading resources in the field of Arabic and Islamic Studies. In this volume, Peri Bearman—the only scholar who was both an in-house editor at Brill, the publishing house that for over a century produced the Encyclopaedia, and also a member of the editorial board—has produced a masterful and detailed account of how it went from being a mere idea to a monument of scholarship. We read about the challenges and pitfalls of conceptualizing, commissioning, vetting, editing, translating, copyediting, proofing, and delivering of articles, about the many personalities involved, and about the conflicts and concessions that had to be made. With unparalleled access to documents, in particular editorial correspondence, Bearman recounts the engaging story of one of the world’s greatest collaborative works in any discipline.

“The author had access to archives of personal papers and letters, and to documentation in the publisher’s records. This has enabled the writing of a work that brings a unique perspective to the history of an invaluable resource, and shines a fascinating light on its creation and backstory, a story that should be of interest to all who use the Encyclopaedia of Islam, for reference, research, or teaching.”
— Roberta Dougherty, Librarian for the Middle East, Yale University Library

Peri Bearman, who retired as associate director of the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School, is widely known as an editor of major works of scholarship on the Islamic Near East. She was senior acquisitions editor for Islamic Studies at Brill Academic Publishers from 1990 to 1997; an editor of the second edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam from 1999 to its completion in 2006; and is currently associate editor for the Islamic Near East for both the journal (JAOS) and the monograph series of the American Oriental Society. She is co-editor of The Ashgate Research Companion to Islamic Law (Ashgate, 2014), of The Law Applied: Contextualizing the Islamic Shari‘a (Tauris, 2008), and of The Islamic School of Law: Evolution, Devolution, and Progress (Harvard Law School, 2005).

Studies in Medieval Islamic Intellectual Traditions

2018-04-17T00:33:05+00:00

Studies in Medieval Islamic Intellectual Traditions focuses on aspects of Islamic thought in Iran and Yemen, and other regions of the Middle East, from the ninth through the fifteenth century CE, through a close study of manuscript materials. The book’s seventeen chapters are arranged under five rubrics: Muʿtazilism, Zaydism in Iran and in Yemen, Twelver Shīʿism, Mysticism, and Bibliogr aphical Traditions. The material included inthe book has been published previously in a different version. Theappearance of these studies together in a single volume makes thisbook a significant and welcome contribution to the field of classical Islamic Studies.

Gods, Objects, and Ritual Practice

2020-11-07T02:01:48+00:00

Conversations about materiality have helped forge a common meeting ground for scholars seeking to integrate images, sites, texts, and implements in their approach to religion in the ancient Mediterranean. The fourteen chapters in this volume explore the productivity of these approaches, with case studies from Israel, Athens, Rome, Sicily, and North Africa . The results foreground the capacity of material approaches to cast lighton the cultural creation of the sacred through the integration of rhetorical,material, and iconographic means. They open more nuanced pathways to theuses of text in the study of material evidence. They highlight the poten tialf or material objects to bring political and ethnic boundaries into the sacredrealm. And they emphasize the role of ongoing interpretation, debate, andmult iple readings in the creation of the sacred, in both ancient contexts and scholarly discussion.

Sumerian Texts from Ancient Iraq

2018-04-08T02:01:24+00:00

The 145 tablets presented in this volume are among a larger group of 302 tablets confiscated by U.S. customs which were being stored in a World Trade Center building when it was destroyed on 9/11. The 145 tablets, which come from an unknown site near Nippur in southern Iraq, are the documents of a high official named Aradmu that detail routine agricultural operations, including receipts and grain loans. The group was repatriated to Iraq in late 2010, after the tablets were conserved and the author had completed his study. The editions offered in this volume complete an incredible journey for the tablets and the stories they hold.

The Amarna Letters in the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary

2018-04-07T14:18:43+00:00

This resource aims to gather together all of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary’s many references to the Amarna Letters, including translations, cross-references, and notes of a bibliographical or philological variety. In so doing, scholars whose work relates to the Amarna Letters ( e.g. Assyriologists, biblical scholars, Egyptologists, archaeologists) now have the fruit of the CAD’s extensive research together in a single document and can easily see if and how a particular line has been taken by the CAD’s editors across the various volumes. A secondary aim is to provide a foundation for studying the CAD as a window into the history of Assyriology.

The Wide Lens in Archaeology

2021-01-13T18:42:47+00:00

This book honors the memory of Brian Hesse, a scholar of Near Eastern archaeology, a writer of alliterative and punned publication titles, and an accomplished amateur photographer. Hesse specialized in zooarchaeology, but he influenced a wider range of excavators and ancient historians with his broad interpretive reach. He spent much of his career analyzing faunal materials from different countries in the Middle East-including Iran, Yemen, and Israel, and his publications covered themes particular to animal bone studies, such as domestication, ancient market economics, as well as broader themes such as determining ethnicity in archaeology. The essays in this volume reflect the breadth of his interests. Most chapters share an Old World geographic setting, focusing either on Europe or the Middle East. The topics are diverse, with the majority discussing animal bones, as was Hesse's specialization, but some take a nonfaunal perspective related to the problems with which Hesse grappled. The volume is also broad in temporal scope, ranging from Neolithic Iran to early Medieval England, and it addresses theoretical matters as well as methodological innovations including taphonomy and the history of computers in zooarchaeology. Several of the essays are direct revisits to, inspirations from, or extensions of Hesse's own research. All the contributions reflect his intense interest in social questions about antiquity; the theme of social archaeology informed much of Brian Hesse's thinking, and it is why his work made such an impact on those working outside his own disciplinary research.

Collections at Risk

2021-01-13T18:28:30+00:00

Conflicts and wars, and more specifically the 2011 Revolution in Egypt, have brought to light the worrying question of the preservation of the cultural heritage in the world. The role of museums and international institutions have become ever more important in this respect. Recognizing that cultural treasures can form the basis for education and economic prosperity, the organizers devoted the 29th Annual Meeting of ICOM's International Committee for Egyptology (CIPEG) to the theme of "Collections at Risk: New Challenges in a New Environment." The present volume contains several of the papers read during those sessions in Brussels in 2012, and gives a clear example of the multifarious paths that lay open to obtaining the objective of preserving the past for the future.

Illuminating Osiris

2021-01-08T20:54:15+00:00

Illuminating Osiris comprises twenty-seven articles by students, friends, and colleagues in honor of Mark Smith, professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford. Smith is especially renowned as a Demoticist and specialist in ancient Egyptian religion. His numerous Demotic text editions and translations of Egyptian funerary and religious compositions have been enormously influential in the field. The contributions in Illuminating Osiris naturally reflect Smith's particular interests in the religion and literature of Graeco-Roman period Egypt, dealing with cult, rituals, astronomy, and divination, among other subjects. The book includes many editions or reeditions of texts written in Demotic, Hieratic, and Ptolemaic Hieroglyphs. It is profusely illustrated and supplied with detailed indices.

Sibawayhi's Principles

2021-01-13T17:54:20+00:00

Michael G. Carter's Sībawyhi's Principles: Arabic Grammar and Law in Early Islamic Thought is a corrected version, with considerable Addenda, of his 1968 Oxford doctoral thesis, "Sībawayhi's Principles of Grammatical Analysis." It systematically argues that the science of Arabic grammar owes its origins to a special application of a set of methods and criteria developed independently to form the Islamic legal system, not to Greek or other foreign influence. These methods and criteria were then adapted to create a grammatical system brought to perfection by Sibawayhi in the late second/eighth century. It describes the intimate contacts between early jurists and scholars of language out of which the new science of grammar evolved, and makes detailed comparisons between the technical terms of law and grammar to show how the vocabulary of the law was applied to the speech of the Arabs. It also sheds light on Sibawayhi's method in producing his magisterial Kitāb.

The Demotic and Hieratic Papyri in the Suzuki Collection of Tokai University, Japan

2021-01-13T18:30:33+00:00

This volume publishes, for the first time, approximately fifty late Egyptian texts from the Suzuki collection held at Tokai University, Japan. The project is a result of a five-year collaboration between Tokai University, Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, The University of Michigan, and the Staatliche Museum zu Berlin. Professor Suzuki formed his collection in the early 1960s when he was based in Cairo. The bulk of the collection, now housed in the Department of Asian Civilization, School of Letters at Tokai University as part of the Ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern Collection (AENET), consists of early demotic texts. There is also one Third Intermediate period hieratic text concerned with temple land, and a few small Greek fragments from the Byzantine period. The texts published here present an interesting range of document types and examples of demotic handwriting, and a few surprises. Among the more intriguing pieces are a fine word list and a new mythological narrative.

Kom el-Hisn (ca. 2500–1900 BC)

2021-01-08T20:19:10+00:00

This volume presents the findings of three seasons of excavation in the 1980s at Kom el-Hisn, "the mound of the fortress," in the northwest Nile Delta. This provincial community was often in the orbit of Memphis, the capital and administrative center of Egypt's Old Kingdom period. Small areas of occupations of the First Intermediate and early Middle Kingdom periods were also excavated. One of the goals of the excavations was to complement and compare the substantial ancient textual record of this era with Kom el-Hisn's archaeological record because such evidence is sparse for Lower Egypt between about 2500 and 1800 BC. The findings presented here reveal the complexity of small Old Kingdom settlements in the context of the Memphite state organization and shed light on the changing relationships of this administrative center with its provincial communities. Kom el-Hisn's faunal, floral, lithic, and architectural remains are presented and discussed in detail, as are some theoretical and methodological issues relevant to this research.

The Theology of Hathor of Dendera

2021-01-13T17:26:11+00:00

The Ptolemaic period witnessed an enormous increase in the number of hieroglyphic signs and iconographic elements (composite crowns, scepters, and cult objects). The ancient scribes exploited this complexity when composing the reliefs used in temple decoration, selecting particular words, hieroglyphic signs, and iconographic elements in order to create interconnected multiple layers of meaning, forming a tapestry of sound and sight. The Theology of Hathor of Dendera examines these techniques on both micro- and macro-levels, from their smallest details to their broadest thematic connections, foregrounding individual techniques to determine the words and phrases singled out for emphasis. By synthesizing their use in the three-dimensional space of the most important cult chamber in the Temple of Hathor at Dendera, this new method of analysis not only reveals the most essential characteristics of the local theology, but also shows how the ancient scribes envisioned the universe and the place of humankind within it.

Coping with Obscurity

2021-01-13T18:29:33+00:00

Coping with Obscurity publishes the papers discussed at the Brown University Workshop on Earlier Egyptian grammar in March, 2013. The workshop united ten scholars of differing viewpoints dealing with the central question of how to judge and interpret the grammatical value of the written evidence preserved in texts of the Old and Middle Kingdoms (ca. 2350-1650 BC). The nine papers in the volume present orthographic, lexical, morphological, and syntactic approaches to the data and represent a significant step toward a new, pluralistic understanding of earlier Egyptian grammar.

The Neo-Assyrian Shield

2021-01-07T19:38:52+00:00

This handbook treats the different types of shields used by soldiers in the Neo-Assyrian army and their opponents. Written, visual, and material sources are analyzed to illustrate practical aspects of defensive weaponry in the ancient Near East in the first millennium B.C. The origins, use, evolution, and manufacture of shields are considered in presenting a typology that is essential reading for enthusiasts and scholars alike.

The Demotic Graffiti from the Temple of Isis on Philae Island

2021-01-13T18:30:59+00:00

This volume publishes 534 new demotic graffiti recorded at the temple of Isis on Philae Island, presented with drawings and photographs. New editions of 101 of the graffiti that were published by F. Griffith in his Catalogue of the Demotic Papyri in the Dodecaschoenus (1937) are published here. These reedited texts were mainly chosen because new drawings provided significant new readings from those made by Griffith, or they helped elucidate the scope and meaning of some of the new graffiti by placement. The volume also includes an essay interpreting the role of the graffiti in understanding the political and religious activities at Philae temple during the last centuries of worship of the goddess Isis, mainly by Nubian priests and pilgrim

Hadith, Piety, and Law

2021-01-13T18:33:07+00:00

The publication of The Formation of the Sunni Schools of Law, Ninth-Tenth Centuries CE, first as a University of Pennsylvania doctoral dissertation in 1992, and subsequently as a monograph in 1997 (Studies in Islamic Law and Society, Brill), established Christoph Melchert as a preeminent scholar of the history of Islamic law and institutions. Through close readings of works on fiqh, meticulous unpacking of data in biographical dictionaries, and careful attention to curricular, pious, pedagogical, and scholarly practices, Melchert has subsequently illuminated the processes and procedures that undergirded the development of Islamic movements and institutions in the formative period of Islam.

The present volume brings together sixteen of his articles, including those considered his most important as well as ones that are difficult to access. Originally published between 1997 and 2014, they are arranged chronologically under three rubrics-hadith, piety, and law. The material is presented in a new format, updated by Melchert where appropriate, and indexed. The appearance of these articles together in a single volume makes this book a highly significant and welcome contribution to the field of classical Islamic Studies.

Al-Ma’mûn, the Inquisition, and the Quest for Caliphal Authority

2021-01-13T18:20:35+00:00

The "inquisition" (Mihnah) unleashed by the seventh Abbasid caliph, 'Abdallah al-Ma'mun (r. 813-833), has long attracted the attention of modern scholars of the intellectual, political, and religious history of the early Abbasid era. Because this event, which began in 820 and stretched through the reigns of two of al-Ma'mun's successors, appears at a convergence of prominent currents in systematic theology, rationalist thought, theocratic politics, and nascent trends in Shiism and Sunnism, historians have seen it as the key to a wide array of puzzles and problems in early Islamic history. In this incisive study, John Nawas subjects the various proposed explanations of these events to a sober and searching analysis and, in the process, presents a new interpretation of al-Ma'mun's political and religious policies, contextualized against the background of early Abbasid intellectual and social history.

Appended to the volume is a reprint edition of Walter M. Patton's Ahmed ibn Hanbal and the Mihna (Leiden 1897), which still has much that is useful for modern scholarship, including one enormous additional benefit; it contains most of the relevant passages in Arabic from the primary sources.

Joyful in Thebes

2021-01-11T17:55:59+00:00

An international group of scholars have contributed to Joyful in Thebes, a Festschrift for the distinguished Egyptologist Betsy M. Bryan. The forty-two articles deal with topics of art history, archaeology, history, and philology representing virtually the entire span of ancient Egyptian civilization. These diverse studies, which often present unpublished material or new interpretations of specific issues in Egyptian history, literature, and art history, well reflect the broad research interests of the honoree. Abundantly illustrated with photographs and line drawings, the volume also includes a comprehensive bibliography of Bryan's publications through 2015.

Carl W. Blegen

2021-01-13T18:28:03+00:00

Carl Blegen is the most famous American archaeologist ever to work in Greece, and no American has ever had a greater impact on Greek archaeology. Yet Blegen, unlike several others of his generation, has found no biographer. In part, the explanation for this must lie in the fact that his life was so multifaceted: not only was he instrumental in creating the field of Aegean prehistory, but Blegen, his wife, and their best friends, the Hills ("the family"), were also significant forces in the social and intellectual community of Athens. Authors who have contributed to this book have each researched one aspect of Blegen's life, drawing on copious documentation in the United States, England, and Greece. The result is a biography that sets Blegen and his closest colleagues in the social and academic milieu that gave rise to the discipline of classical archaeology in Greece.

La Arqueología de los Animales de Mesoamérica

2021-01-13T18:26:59+00:00

El reconocimiento del papel de los animales en las antiguas dietas, en las economias, politicas y los rituales, es vital para poder entender a las culturas del pasado en su totalidad. Por el otro lado, seguir las claves que se obtienen de restos de animales preteritos puede aproximarnos a entender la antigua relacion que existia entre los humanos y el mundo que les rodeaba. En respuesta a un creciente interes en el campo de la zooarqueologia, este libro presenta investigaciones que representan a las multiples culturas y regiones de Mesoamerica, tratando especificamente los aspectos mas recurrentes en la literatura zooarqueologica. Desde el punto de vista geografico, los ensayos reunidos aqui informan acerca del uso de animals por parte de los pueblos indigenas de toda el area mesoamericana, ubicada entre los confines nortenos de Mexico y la frontera sur, en Centroamerica. Esto incluye culturas tan diversas como los olmecas, mayas, mixtecos, zapotecos e indigenas de Centroamerica. El marco temporal del libro se extiende desde el Preclasico y Clasico, sobre el Posclasico, los tiempos coloniales e historicos, hasta la epoca actual. Los capitulos del libro, escritos por expertos en la materia de la zooarqueologia mesoamericana, proporcionan un fondo de conocimiento general e importante acerca del uso domestico y ritual durante los tiempos tempranos y clasicos de Mesoamerica y Centroamerica, pero abarcan tambien aspectos especificos de la relacion entre humanos y animales, tales como la domesticacion temprana y el simbolismo de animales, asi como otros puntos aun pobremente entendidos, relacionados a la tafonomia y a la metodologia zooarqueologica.

Landscape Archaeology of the Western Nile Delta

2021-01-11T17:50:34+00:00

Different ideas of what constitutes an archaeological site have developed over two centuries of scholarship and heritage law in Egypt, with sites often (unconsciously) conceived as lands with museum-quality pieces and striking monumental, mortuary, and/or epigraphic remains. As a result, the material record of the powerful dominates Egyptological discourse, leaving hundreds of unexplored sites in the delta floodplain and their potential contributions to a narrative of Egyptian culture largely ignored.

Attempting to correct this, the author integrates historical maps, remote sensing data, and ancient texts to understand the dynamic landscape of the western Nile Delta. Weaving together new archaeological survey, Corona satellite images, and a targeted program of drill coring, this volume offers a palimpsest of settlement and paleoenvironment from the New Kingdom to Late Roman era. In the face of forces undermining many sites' integrity, this study adapts techniques in landscape archaeology to an Egyptian context, anticipating triage and salvage in the decades to come.

The Archaeology of Mesoamerican Animals

2021-01-13T18:23:06+00:00

Recognition of the role of animals in ancient diet, economy, politics, and ritual is vital to understanding ancient cultures fully, while following the clues available from animal remains in reconstructing environments is vital to understanding the ancient relationship between humans and the world around them. In response to the growing interest in the field of zooarchaeology, this volume presents current research from across the many cultures and regions of Mesoamerica, dealing specifically with the most current issues in zooarchaeological literature. Geographically, the essays collected here index the different aspects of animal use by the indigenous populations of the entire area between the northern borders of Mexico and the southern borders of lower Central America. This includes such diverse cultures as the north Mexican hunter-gatherers, the Olmec, Maya, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Central American Indians. The time frame of the volume extends from the earliest human occupation, the Preclassic, Classic, Postclassic, and Colonial manifestations, to recent times. The book's chapters, written by experts in the field of Mesoamerican zooarchaeology, provide important general background on the domestic and ritual use of animals in early and classic Mesoamerica and Central America, but deal also with special aspects of human-animal relationships such as early domestication and symbolism of animals, and important yet otherwise poorly represented aspects of taphonomy and zooarchaeological methodology.

The Economy of Certainty

2021-01-13T18:31:25+00:00

Aron Zysow's 1984 PhD dissertation, "The Economy of Certainty," remains the most important, compelling, and intellectually ambitious treatment of Islamic legal theory (usul al-fiqh) in Western scholarship to date. It continues to be widely read and cited, and remains unsurpassed in its incisive analysis of the most fundamental assumptions of Islamic legal thought.

Zysow argues that the great dividing line in Islamic legal thought is between those legal theories that require certainty in every detail of the law and those that will admit probability. The latter were historically dominant and include the leading legal schools that have survived to our own day. Zahirism and, for much of its history, Twelver Shi'ism, are examples of the former. The well-known dispute regarding the legitimacy of juridical analogy is only one feature of this fundamental epistemological division, since probability can enter the law in the process of authenticating prophetic traditions and in the interpretation of the revealed texts, as well as through analogy. The notion of consensus in Islamic legal theory functioned to reintroduce some measure of certainty into the law by identifying one of the competing probable solutions as correct. Consequently consensus has only a reduced role, if any, in those systems that reject probability. Another, more radical, means of regaining certainty was the doctrine that regarded the legal reasoning of all qualified jurists on matters of probability as infallible. The development of legal theories of both types, that of Zahirism no less than that of Hanafism, was to a large extent shaped by theology and, most significantly, by Mu'tazilism, and subsequently by Ash'arism and Maturidism.

Zysow's important work is published here in full, for the first time, with updated references and some further reflections by the author.

Current Research at Kültepe-Kanesh

2021-01-13T18:30:05+00:00

The material remains and the more than 23,500 cuneiform tablets unearthed at the site of Kültepe (ancient Kanesh) shed light on social, political, and economic aspects of the Middle Bronze age (ca. 2000–1700 years BC) in central Anatolia, but also in upper Mesopotamia. The rich textual record provides ample information on a very sophisticated supraregional market economy, representing one of the best-documented historical cases of long-distance trade in the ancient world. Although the site was first excavated in 1893, followed by intermittent excavations between 1906 and 2005, modern scientific and interdisciplinary excavations have only been undertaken since 2006. The new scientific research at Kültepe-Kanesh has already begun amassing new data and providing us with a unique opportunity to generate new perspectives and to challenge previous models and assumptions about, for example, trade, colonialism, ethnicity, art, religious ideas, identity, and patterns of social, political, and economic organization in the Near East during the Middle Bronze Age. A primary goal of this special volume is to integrate the work of scholars in archaeology, archaeometry, bioarchaeology, geoarchaeology, and history to develop a new synthetic research paradigm for investigating issues of trade, colonialism, ethnicity, art, identity, and urbanization in the Near East in a unified fashion.

Beyond Hatti

2021-01-13T18:27:35+00:00

This collection of essays honors the life and work of Gary Beckman, Professor of Hittite and Mesopotamian Studies at the University of Michigan. The essays were contributed by his colleagues, students, and friends, and their breadth—traversing ancient Anatolia, Syria, Mesopotamia, and beyond—are a measure of the range of his influence as a scholar. His interest in the reception and adaptation of Syro-Mesopotamian culture by the Hittites in particular inspired this offering.

The Edwin Smith Papyrus

2021-01-13T18:31:52+00:00

This volume contains the original hieratic text, complete transcription into hieroglyphs, transliteration, English translation, philological apparatus and copiously illustrated medical commentaries for the forty-eight clinical cases of the Edwin Smith Papyrus, as well as extensive bibliographical resources, and a lucid introduction exploring the importance of the document, the history of previous scholarship, and distinctive aspects of the current edition. It offers an authoritative treatment of the Egyptian text, which clarifies the meaning of many passages from the papyrus and points the way to their correct medical interpretation. The Edwin Smith Papyrus (ESP) is the first comprehensive trauma treatise in the history of medicine. Not only is the ESP the source of numerous anatomical and functional concepts of the nervous system, it is the basis for the development of modern objective clinical thinking, establishing the foundations of modern medicine more than a thousand years before Hippocrates. The volume features an impressive array of medical material that reveals the precise conditions described by the ancient physician and explores the Egyptian contribution to modern diagnostics, clinical practice, and methodology. This publication sets the standard in the presentation of ancient medical documents. It also includes the previously unpublished translation of the papyrus by Edwin Smith himself.

A Reader of Classical Arabic Literature

2021-01-13T17:35:43+00:00

A Reader of Classical Arabic Literature is one of a very small group of resources in English for the teaching of intermediate and advanced level classical Arabic. Based on his lecture notes, the late Seeger Bonebakker designed a superb teaching text, which he then asked his UCLA colleague, Michael Fishbein, to help him annotate and augment. The result is a truly valuable reader, one used widely in the United States and Europe, featuring judicious and instructive selections from such works as Ibn al-Qifti's Inbah al-ruwat, al-Tanukhi's al-Faraj ba'd al-shidda, and al-Dhahabi's Siyar a'lam al-nubala', among others.

The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Earth

2021-01-13T18:21:56+00:00

Collections of scenes and texts designated variously as the "Book of the Earth," "Creation of the Solar Disc," and "Book of Aker" were inscribed on the walls of royal sarcophagus chambers throughout Egypt's Ramessid period (Dynasties 19–20). This material illustrated discrete episodes from the nocturnal voyage of the sun god, which functioned as a model for the resurrection of the deceased king. These earliest "Books of the Earth" employed mostly ad hoc arrangements of scenes, united by shared elements of iconography, an overarching, bipartite symmetry of composition, and their frequent pairing with representations of the double sky overhead. From the Twenty-First Dynasty and later, selections of programmatic tableaux were adapted for use in private mortuary contexts, often in conjunction with innovative or previously unattested annotations. The present study collects and analyzes all currently known Book of the Earth material, including discussions of iconography, grammar, orthography, and architectural setting.

Lockwood Press Online

Written Middle Persian Literature under the Sasanids

Between Philology and Archaeology

Migration and Mobility in the Ancient Near East and Egypt

Snake Identification in the Ancient Egyptian Brooklyn Medical Papyrus

Babylonian Ceremonial Script in Its Scholarly Context

A View from the Herd

From New Haven to Nineveh and Beyond

Islamic Jurisprudence, Islamic Law, and Modernity

From the Fields of Offerings

Wonderful Things

Data Science, Human Science, and Ancient Gods

Ramesses II, Egypt's Ultimate Pharaoh

Weseretkau “Mighty of Kas”

Esarhaddon, King of Assyria

Destruction and Its Impact on Ancient Societies at the End of the Bronze Age

Salvage Excavations at Tel Qashish (Tell Qasis) and Tell el-Wa’er (2010–2013)

A Sanctuary in the Hora of Illyrian Apollonia

Ancient Egyptian Prisoner Statues: Fragments of the Late Old Kingdom

One Who Loves Knowledge

Ancient Egyptian Prisoner Statues

Cattle and People

The Temple of Ramesses II in Abydos Volume 3

The SŌUSHÉN HÒUJÌ

The Restoration of Sunnism

A Journey through the Beyond

KEOS 12

Archaeozoology of Southwest Asia and Adjacent Areas XIII

Purifying a House from Blood

Essays on Three Iranian Language Groups

On the Path to the Place of Rest

The Temple of Ramesses II in Abydos Volume 2

The Classical Legacy of Gilbert Highet

The Poetics of Adonis and Yves Bonnefoy

His Good Name

Beowulf & Beyond

The Woman in the Pith Helmet

Sargonic and Pre-Sargonic Cuneiform Texts in the Yale Babylonian Collection

Ancient Egyptian Biographies

Arabic Belles Lettres

Receptions of the Ancient Near East in Popular Culture and Beyond

Religious Convergence in the Ancient Mediterranean

Concluding the Neolithic

The Hittite Gilgamesh

Muslim Perceptions and Receptions of the Bible

New Trends in Qur’anic Studies

Sargonic Texts from Telloh in the Istanbul Archaeological Museums

Rain-Giver, Bone-Breaker, Score-Settler

Selected Studies in Modern Arabic Narrative: History, Genre, Translation

A Qur’ānic Apocalypse

The History of Phoenicia

A History of the Encyclopaedia of Islam

Studies in Medieval Islamic Intellectual Traditions

Gods, Objects, and Ritual Practice

Sumerian Texts from Ancient Iraq

The Amarna Letters in the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary

The Wide Lens in Archaeology

Collections at Risk

Illuminating Osiris

Sibawayhi's Principles

The Demotic and Hieratic Papyri in the Suzuki Collection of Tokai University, Japan

Kom el-Hisn (ca. 2500–1900 BC)

The Theology of Hathor of Dendera

Coping with Obscurity

The Neo-Assyrian Shield

The Demotic Graffiti from the Temple of Isis on Philae Island

Hadith, Piety, and Law

Al-Ma’mûn, the Inquisition, and the Quest for Caliphal Authority

Joyful in Thebes

Carl W. Blegen

La Arqueologí­a de los Animales de Mesoamérica

Landscape Archaeology of the Western Nile Delta

The Archaeology of Mesoamerican Animals

The Economy of Certainty

Current Research at Kültepe-Kanesh

Beyond Hatti

The Edwin Smith Papyrus

A Reader of Classical Arabic Literature

The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Earth

La Arqueología de los Animales de Mesoamérica