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This abundantly illustrated volume explores the genesis and flourishing of Uruk, the first known metropolis in the history of humankind. More than one hundred years ago, discoveries from a German archaeological dig at Uruk, roughly two hundred miles south of present-day Baghdad, sent shock waves through the scholarly world. Founded at the end of the fifth millennium BCE, Uruk was the main force for urbanization in what has come to be called the Uruk period (4000–3200 BCE), during which small, agricultural villages gave way to a larger urban center with a stratified society, complex governmental bureaucracy, and monumental architecture and art. It was here that proto-cuneiform script—the ...
The ancient Near East is not only where the world's earliest writing system, Babylonian cuneiform, was invented some 5,000 years ago, but also where nearly 2,000 years later numerous other scripts developed each to write a specific language. As a framework for the rich intellectual history of this region's ancient past, this book investigates how this "confusion of tongues" came about, how writings in the multiple languages and scripts interacted with each other, and what the consequences were.
This volume presents recent research on the relationship between the material format of text-bearing artefacts, the texts they carry, and their genre. The essays cover a vast period, from the counting stones of the late 4th millennium BCE to the time of the Great Hittite Kingdom in the 2nd millennium BCE. The breadth of substantive focus allows new insights of relevance to scholars in both Ancient Middle Eastern studies and the humanities.
Audiences are among the dominant elements of courtly life and may be referred to as a central aspect of representation of power in many societies. Audiences also served as a stage for negotiation and political decision-making. Beyond that, the ceremonial of audience acted as an integrative factor, strengthening the connections between the ruler and his subjects, the élite and his dynastic background. It thus reflects the structure, or at least the intended structure of rule, and allows us to get insight into the perception of the ruler in the respective society. This volume offers an approach to forms and structures of audiences in different epochs and regions. Choosing a transcultural and ...
A sweeping history of the ancient Near East from 3500 to 323 BCE, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings is built around the life stories of many ancient men and women. Their habits of daily life, beliefs, triumphs, and crises, and the changes that they faced over time are explored through their own written words and the buildings, cities, and empires in which they lived.
From Flood to Fallen Kingdoms (FFFK) is the first truly authoritative, detailed and coherent, young-earth creationist overview of the post-flood history of the ancient Near East (and the land of Israel), for laypersons and scholars alike. It is a unique work which does not have serious rivals in the biblical-creationist book market. The lack of a good and comprehensive introductory book was the main reason why I started to write the book in the first place. I have made use of the best available scholarly literature, Christian as well as secular. The book contains a lot of my own research, but it is also in very good agreement with the archaeological articles written by A. J. M. Osgood (can b...
Your Complete Guide to Hundreds of Goddesses Around the World Meet the many incarnations of the divine feminine, past and present, with this comprehensive reference guide by bestselling author Shelley A. Kaehr, PhD. Featuring more than five hundred goddesses, over forty exercises and journal prompts, and guided journeys for understanding yourself at the soul level, this book connects you with ancestral energy and can bring peace and balance to your life. Shelley first introduces you to goddesses of the ancient world, exploring Egyptian, Celtic, Greek, Norse, and Mesoamerican pantheons. She then shares the living goddesses of modern world religions—African, East Asian, Hindu, and Indigenous peoples. Each goddess entry features her keywords, categories, history, and lore. In discovering these deities, you can enliven goddess energy within you and even uncover past lives.
Ancient religions are definitely complex systems of gods, which resist our understanding. Divine names provide fundamental keys to gain access to the multiples ways gods were conceived, characterized, and organized. Among the names given to the gods many of them refer to spaces: cities, landscapes, sanctuaries, houses, cosmic elements. They reflect mental maps which need to be explored in order to gain new knowledge on both the structure of the pantheons and the human agency in the cultic dimension. By considering the intersection between naming and mapping, this book opens up new perspectives on how tradition and innovation, appropriation and creation play a role in the making of polytheist...
This book explores European soldiers’ encounters with their continent’s exotic frontiers from the French Revolution to the First World War. In numerous military expeditions to Italy, Spain, Russia, Greece and the ‘Levant’ they found wild landscapes and strange societies inhabited by peoples who needed to be ‘civilized.’ Yet often they also discovered founding sites of Europe’s own ‘civilization’ (Rome, Jerusalem) or decaying reminders of ancient grandeur. The resulting encounters proved seminal in forging a military version of the ‘civilizing mission’ that shaped Europe’s image of itself as well as its relations with its own periphery during the long nineteenth century.
Hermann Gunkel was a scholar in the generation of the origins of Assyriology, the spectacular discovery by George Smith of fragments of the “Chaldean Genesis,” and the Babel-Bibel debate. Gunkel’s thesis, inspired by materials supplied to him by the Assyriologist Heinrich Zimmern, was to take the Chaoskampf motif of Revelation as an event that would not only occur at the end of the world but had already happened at the beginning, before Creation. In other words, in this theory, one imagines God in Genesis 1 as first having battled Rahab, Leviathan, and Yam (the forces of Chaos) in a grand battle, and only then beginning to create. The problem with Gunkel’s theory is that it did not s...