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Feasts
In this collection of fifteen essays, archaeologists and ethnographers explore the material record of food and its consumption as social practice.
Before Writing, Vol. I
Before Writing gives a new perspective on the evolution of communication. It points out that when writing began in Mesopotamia it was not, as previously thought, a sudden and spontaneous invention. Instead, it was the outgrowth of many thousands of years' worth of experience at manipulating symbols. In Volume I: From Counting to Cuneiform, Denise Schmandt-Besserat describes how in about 8000 B.C., coinciding with the rise of agriculture, a system of counters, or tokens, appeared in the Near East. These tokens—small, geometrically shaped objects made of clay—represented various units of goods and were used to count and account for them. The token system was a breakthrough in data processi...
Let Us Go to the Seer!
Prophecy in the Hebrew Bible (“Old Testament”) has long been regarded as fundamentally different from the divinatory methods of ancient pagans: while the pagans sought out and solicited messages from the gods, the Hebrew prophets received revelation spontaneously, at the initiative of Israel’s deity. The trouble with this dichotomy between solicited and spontaneous revelation is that it overlooks or misreads a number of ancient sources, and it obscures the similarities between Hebrew and other societies of the ancient Middle East. In this book, Ryan D. Schroeder re-examines the evidence for prophecy both in the Hebrew Bible and in documents excavated in Israel/Palestine, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq since the late nineteenth century. He shows that prophecies were regularly solicited across ancient West Asia. Moreover, the spontaneity of Israelite revelation is largely a mirage produced by ancient Hebrew scribes and reinforced by modern scholars intent on establishing the uniqueness and superiority of “biblical” religion.
The Invention of God
Who invented God? When, why, and where? Thomas Römer seeks to answer these questions about the deity of the great monotheisms—Yhwh, God, or Allah—by tracing Israelite beliefs and their context from the Bronze Age to the end of the Old Testament period in the third century BCE. That we can address such enigmatic questions at all may come as a surprise. But as Römer makes clear, a wealth of evidence allows us to piece together a reliable account of the origins and evolution of the god of Israel. Römer draws on a long tradition of historical, philological, and exegetical work and on recent discoveries in archaeology and epigraphy to locate the origins of Yhwh in the early Iron Age, when ...
Time at Emar
The recent large-scale watershed projects in northern Syria, where the ancient city of Emar was located, have brought this area to light, thanks to salvage operation excavations before the area was submerged. Excavations at Meskeneh-Qadimeh on the great bend of the Euphrates River revealed this large town, which had been built in the late 14th century and then destroyed violently at the beginning of the 12th, at the end of the Bronze Age. In the town of Emar, ritual tablets were discovered in a temple that are demonstrated to have been recorded by the supervisor of the local cult, who was called the "diviner." This religious leader also operated a significant writing center, which focused on...
Piety and Politics
Ancient kings who did not honor the gods overlooked an indispensable means for ruling effectively in their communities. In many traditional societies royal authority was regarded as a divine gift bestowed according to the quality of the relationship of the king both to God or the gods and to the people. The tension and the harmony within these human and divine relationships demanded that the king repeatedly strive to integrate the community's piety with his political strategies. This fascinating study explores the relationship between religion and royal authority in three of history's most influential civilizations: Homeric Greece, biblical Israel, and Old Babylonian Mesopotamia. Dale Launde...
History of the Akkadian Language (2 vols)
Akkadian is, after Sumerian, the second oldest language attested in the Ancient Near East, as well as the oldest known Semitic language. It is also a language with one of history’s longest written records. And yet, unlike other relevant languages written over a long period of time, there has been no volume dedicated to its own history. The aim of the present work is to fill that void. The outcome is presented in 26 chapters written by 25 leading authors and divided into two volumes, the first covering the linguistic background and early periods and the second covering the second and first millennia BCE as well as its afterlife.
Presargonic Period
The book Presargonic Period (2700-2350 BC) provides editions of all known royal inscriptions of kings who ruled in ancient Mesopotamia down to the advent of King Sargon of Akkad. Most of the inscriptions come from the city states of Lagsh and Umma; inscriptions from other sites are rather poorly attested. The volume includes a handful of new inscriptions recently uncovered in Iraq. Information on museum numbers, excavation numbers, provenances, dimensions, and lines preserved in the various exemplars are displayed for multi-exemplar texts in an easy-to-read tabular form. Also included in several commentary sections are notes on the find-spots of the inscriptions from Lagas and references about various toponymns to be discussed in a forthcoming study of the author on the geography of Lagas and Umma provinces. Indexes of museum numbers, excavation numbers, and concordances of selected publications complete the volume.
The Heavenly Writing
In antiquity, the expertise of the Babylonians in matters of the heavens was legendary and the roots of both western astronomy and astrology are traceable in cuneiform tablets going back to the second and first millennia BC. The Heavenly Writing, first publsiehd in 2004, discusses the place of Babylonian celestial divination, horoscopy, and astronomy in Mesopotamian intellectual culture. Focusing chiefly on celestial divination and horoscopes, it traces the emergence of personal astrology from the tradition of celestial divination and the use of astronomical methods in horoscopes. It further takes up the historiographical and philosophical issue of the nature of these Mesopotamian 'celestial sciences' by examining elements traditionally of concern to the philosophy of science, without sacrificing the ancient methods, goals, and interests to a modern image of science. This book will be of particular interest to those concerned with the early history of science.
Law and Enforcement in Ptolemaic Egypt
This book investigates the law enforcement system of Ptolemaic Egypt (323-30 BC).
