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This volume addresses and problematizes the formation and transformation of the ancient Near Eastern art historical and archaeological canon. The 'canon' is defined as an established list of objects, monuments, buildings, and sites that are considered to be most representative of the ancient Near East. In "testing" this canon, this project takes stock of the current canon, its origins, endurance, and prospects. Boundaries and typologies are examined, technologies of canon production are investigated, and heritage perspectives on contemporary culture offer a key to the future.
This compilation of original research articles highlight the important cross-regional, cross-chronological, and comparative approaches to political and economic landscapes in ancient South Asia and its neighbors. Focusing on the Indus Valley period and Iron Age India, this volume incorporates new research in South Asia within the broader universe of archaeological scholarship. Contributions focus on four major themes: reinterpreting material culture; identifying domains and regional boundaries; articulating complexity; and modeling interregional interaction. These studies develop theoretical models that may be applicable researchers studying cultural complexity elsewhere in the world.
The use of world-systems theory to explain the spread of social complexity has become accepted practice by both historians and archaeologists. Gil Stein now offers the first rigorous test of world systems as a model in archaeology, arguing that the application of world-systems theory to noncapitalist, pre-fifteenth-century societies distorts our understanding of developmental change by overemphasizing the role of external over internal dynamics. In this new study, Stein proposes two complementary theoretical frameworks for the study of interregional interaction: a "distance-parity" model, which views world-systems as simply one factor in a broader range of intersocietal relations, and a "tra...
Empresses-in-Waiting comprises case studies of late antique empresses, female members of imperial dynasties, and female members of the highest nobility of the late Roman empire, ranging from the fourth to the seventh centuries AD. Situated in the context of the broader developments of scholarship on late antique and byzantine empresses, this volume explores the political agency, religious authority, and influence of imperial and near-imperial women within the Late Roman imperial court, which is understood as a complex spatial, social, and cultural system, the centre of patronage networks, and an arena for elite competition. The studies explore female performance and representation in literar...
The Archaeology of Iran from the Palaeolithic to the Archaemenid Empire is the first modern academic study to provide a synthetic, diachronic analysis of the archaeology and early history of all of Iran from the Palaeolithic period to the end of the Achaemenid Empire at 330 BC. Drawing on the authors’ deep experience and engagement in the world of Iranian archaeology, and in particular on Iran-based academic networks and collaborations, this book situates the archaeological evidence from Iran within a framework of issues and debates of relevance today. Such topics include human–environment interactions, climate change and societal fragility, the challenges of urban living, individual and...
Studies of seals and sealing practices have traditionally investigated aspects of social, political, economic, and ideological systems in ancient societies throughout the Old World. Previously, scholarship has focused on description and documentation, chronology and dynastic histories, administrative function, iconography, and style. More recent studies have emphasized context, production and use, and increasingly, identity, gender, and the social lives of seals, their users, and the artisans who produced them. Using several methodological and theoretical perspectives, this volume presents up-to-date research on seals that is comparative in scope and focus. The cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach advances our understanding of the significance of an important class of material culture of the ancient world. The volume will serve as an essential resource for scholars, students, and others interested in glyptic studies, seal production and use, and sealing practices in the Ancient Near East, Egypt, Ancient South Asia and the Aegean during the 4th-2nd Millennia BCE.
This volume presents a range of methodologically innovative treatments on ritual action in the Hebrew Bible. They treat a diverse range of ritual phenomena, including space, blessings and oath-taking, from the world of ancient Israel and Judah. The introduction engages with the dominant scholarly models drawn from ritual theory, and the volume explores their applicability to ancient textual material such as the Hebrew Bible. The chapters reflect high-level specialized engagement with specific ritual phenomena through the lens of appropriate theoretical and methodological approaches.
Located in the Mewar region of Rajasthan, India, Gilund is the largest known site of the Ahar-Banas Cultural Complex, a large agropastoral group that was contemporaneous with and flanked by the Indus Civilization. Occupied during the Chalcolithic and Early Historic periods, the ancient site of Gilund holds significant clues to understanding third millennium B.C.E cultural interactions in South Asia and beyond. Excavations at Gilund provides a full analysis of the artifacts recovered during the five-year excavation project conducted by the University of Pennsylvania and Deccan College. The excavators investigated the regional development of early farming villages, their shifting subsistence p...
In this book, Philip Zhakevich examines the technology of writing as it existed in the southern Levant during the Iron Age II period, after the alphabetic writing system had fully taken root in the region. Using the Hebrew Bible as its corpus and focusing on a set of Hebrew terms that designated writing surfaces and instruments, this study synthesizes the semantic data of the Bible with the archeological and art-historical evidence for writing in ancient Israel. The bulk of this work comprises an in-depth lexicographical analysis of Biblical Hebrew terms related to Israel’s writing technology. Employing comparative Semitics, lexical semantics, and archaeology, Zhakevich provides a thorough...
Selves Engraved on Stone explores the ways in which multiple aspects of identity were constructed through the material, visual, and textual characteristics of personal seals from ancient Mesopotamia and Syria in the latter half of the 2nd millennium BCE.