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South Arabia, an area encompassing all of today’s Yemen and neighboring regions in Saudi Arabia and Oman, is one of the least-known parts of the Near East. However, it is primarily due to its remoteness, coupled with the difficulty of access, that South Arabia remains under-researched, for this region was, in fact, very important during pre-Islamic times. By virtue of its location at the crossroads of caravan and maritime routes, pre-Islamic South Arabia linked the Near East with Africa and the Mediterranean with India. The region is also unique in that it has a written history extending as far back as the early first millennium BCE—a far longer history, indeed, than any other part of the Arabian Peninsula. The papers collected in this volume make a number of important contributions to the study of the history and languages of ancient South Arabia, as well as the history of the modern study of South Arabia’s past, which will be of interest to scholars and laypeople alike.
South Arabia is one of the least known parts of the Near East. It is primarily due to its remoteness, coupled with the difficulty of access, that South Arabia remains so under-explored. In pre-Islamic times, however, it was well-connected to the rest of the world. Due to its location at the crossroads of caravan and maritime routes, pre-Islamic South Arabia linked the Near East with Africa and the Mediterranean with India. The region is unique in that it has a written history extending as far back as the early first millennium BCE—a far longer history than that of any other part of the Arabian Peninsula. The papers collected in this volume make a number of important contributions to the study of the history and languages of ancient South Arabia, as well as the history of South Arabian studies, and will be of interest to scholars and laypeople alike.
This book approaches the religion and rituals of the pre-Islamic Arabian nomads using the Safaitic inscriptions. Unlike Islamic-period literary sources, this material was produced by practitioners of traditional Arabian religion; the inscriptions are eyewitnesses to the religious life of Arabian nomads prior to the spread of Judaism and Christianity across Arabia. The author attempts to reconstruct this world using the original words of its inhabitants, interpreted through comparative philology, pre-Islamic and Islamic-period literary sources, and the archaeological context.
The title “Queen of the Arabs” is applied in Neo-Assyrian texts to five women from the Arabian Peninsula. These women led armies, offered tribute, and held religious roles in their communities from 738 to approximately 651 BCE. This book discusses what the title meant to the women who carried it and to the Assyrians who wrote about them. Whereas previous scholarship has considered the Queens of the Arabs in relation to the military and economic history of the Neo-Assyrian empire, Eleanor Bennett focuses on identity, using gender theory to locate points of the women’s alterity in Assyrian sources and to analyze how Assyrian cultural norms influenced the treatment of the “Queens of the...
An essential single-volume companion to the critical interpretation of Islamic scripture This book provides detailed and multidisciplinary coverage of a wealth of key Qur’anic terms, with incisive entries on crucial expressions ranging from the divine names allāh (“God”) and al-raḥmān (“the Merciful”) to the Qur’anic understanding of belief and self-surrender to God. It examines what the terms mean in Qur’anic usage, discusses how to translate them into English, and delineates the role they play in expressing the Qur’an’s distinctive understanding of God, humans, and the cosmos. It offers a comprehensive but nonreductionist investigation of the relationship of Qur’ani...
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Travel and pilgrimage have become central research topics in recent years. Some archaeologists and historians have applied globalization theories to ancient intercultural connections. Classicists have rediscovered travel as a literary topic in Greek and Roman writing. Scholars of early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have been rethinking long-familiar pilgrimage practices in new interdisciplinary contexts. This volume contributes to this flourishing field of study in two ways. First, the focus of its contributions is on experiences of travel. Our main question is: How did travelers in the ancient world experience and make sense of their journeys, real or imaginary, and of the places they visited? Second, by treating Jewish, Christian, and Islamic experiences together, this volume develops a longue durée perspective on the ways in which travel experiences across these three traditions resembled each other. By focusing on "experiences of travel," we hope to foster interaction between the study of ancient travel in the humanities and that of broader human experience in the social sciences.
The Hebrew Bible formulates two sets of law: one for the Israelites and one for the gentile "residents" living in the Holy Land. Law Beyond Israel: From the Bible to the Qur'an argues that these biblical laws for non-Israelites form the historical basis of qur'anic law. This volume corroborates its central claim by assessing laws for gentiles in late antique Jewish and especially in Christian legal discourse, pointing to previously underappreciated legal continuity from the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament and from late antique Christianity to nascent Islam. This volume first sketches the legal obligations that the Hebrew Bible imposes on gentiles, on humanity more broadly and, more specifi...
A new history of Assyria, the ancient civilization that set the model for future empires At its height in 660 BCE, the kingdom of Assyria stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. It was the first empire the world had ever seen. Here, historian Eckart Frahm tells the epic story of Assyria and its formative role in global history. Assyria’s wide-ranging conquests have long been known from the Hebrew Bible and later Greek accounts. But nearly two centuries of research now permit a rich picture of the Assyrians and their empire beyond the battlefield: their vast libraries and monumental sculptures, their elaborate trade and information networks, and the crucial role played by royal women. Although Assyria was crushed by rising powers in the late seventh century BCE, its legacy endured from the Babylonian and Persian empires to Rome and beyond. Assyria is a stunning and authoritative account of a civilization essential to understanding the ancient world and our own.