Download or read book Ebla and its Landscape written by Paolo Matthiae and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The discovery of 17,000 tablets at the mid-third millennium BC site of Ebla in Syria has revolutionized the study of the ancient Near East. This is the first major English-language volume describing the multidisciplinary archaeological research at Ebla. Using an innovative regional landscape approach, the 29 contributions to this expansive volume examine Ebla in its regional context through lenses of archaeological, textual, archaeobiological, archaeometric, geomorphological, and remote sensing analysis. In doing so, they are able to provide us with a detailed picture of the constituent elements and trajectories of early state development at Ebla, essential to those studying the ancient Near East and to other archaeologists, historians, anthropologists, and linguists. This work was made possible by an IDEAS grant from the European Research Council.
Download or read book A Land in Between written by Melissa Kennedy and published by Sydney University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Orontes Valley in western Syria is a land ‘in between’, positioned between the small trading centres of the coast and the huge urban agglomerations of the Euphrates Valley and the Syro-Mesopotamian plains beyond. As such, it provides a critical missing link in our understanding of the archaeology of this region in the early urban age. A Land in Between documents the material culture and socio-political relationships of the Orontes Valley and its neighbours during the second half of the 3rd millennium BCE. The authors demonstrate that the valley was a chief conduit for the exchange of knowledge and goods that fuelled the first urban age in western Syria. This lays the foundation for a comparative perspective, providing a clearer understanding of key differences between the Orontes region and its neighbours, and insights into how patterns of material and political association changed over time.
Download or read book Wool Economy in the Ancient Near East written by Catherine Breniquet and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of the Ancient Near East covers a huge chronological frame, from the first pictographic texts of the late 4th millennium to the conquest of Alexander the Great in 333 BC. During these millennia, different societies developed in a changing landscape where sheep (and their wool) always played an important economic role. The 22 papers presented here explore the place of wool in the ancient economy of the region, where large-scale textile production began during the second half of the 3rd millennium. By placing emphasis on the development of multi-disciplinary methodologies, experimentation and use of archaeological evidence combined with ancient textual sources, the wide-ranging contributions explore a number of key themes. These include: the first uses of wool in textile manufacture and organization of weaving; trade and exchange; the role of wool in institutionalized economies; and the reconstruction of the processes that led to this first form of industry in Antiquity. The numerous archaeological and written sources provide an enormous amount of data on wool, textile crafts, and clothing and these inter-disciplinary studies are beginning to present a comprehensive picture of the economic and cultural impact of woollen textiles and textile manufacturing on formative ancient societies.
Download or read book New Agendas in Remote Sensing and Landscape Archaeology in the Near East written by Dan Lawrence and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2020-08-27 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents papers in honour of Tony James Wilkinson, who was Professor of Archaeology at Durham University from 2006 until his death in 2014. Though commemorative in concept, the volume is an assemblage of new research representing emerging agendas and innovative methods in remote sensing and their application in Near Eastern archaeology.
Download or read book Composite Artefacts in the Ancient Near East written by Silvana Di Paolo and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume represents a first attempt to conceptualise the construction and use of composite artefacts in the Ancient Near East by looking at the complex relationships between environments, materials, societies and materiality.
Download or read book Archaeological Explorations in Syria 2000 2011 written by Jeanine Abdul Massih and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2018-07-16 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Syria has been a major crossroads of civilizations in the ancient Near East since the dawn of human kind. This volume brings together scholars involved in archaeological activities in Syria and focusses on the scientific aspects of each explored site, allowing researchers to examine in detail each heritage site, its characteristics and identity.
Download or read book Ritual Performance and Politics in the Ancient Near East written by Lauren Ristvet and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Lauren Ristvet rethinks the narratives of state formation by investigating the interconnections between ritual, performance, and politics in the ancient Near East. She draws on a wide range of archaeological, iconographic, and cuneiform sources to show how ritual performance was not set apart from the real practice of politics; it was politics. Rituals provided an opportunity for elites and ordinary people to negotiate political authority. Descriptions of rituals from three periods explore the networks of signification that informed different societies. From circa 2600 to 2200 BC, pilgrimage made kingdoms out of previously isolated villages. Similarly, from circa 1900 to 1700 BC, commemorative ceremonies legitimated new political dynasties by connecting them to a shared past. Finally, in the Hellenistic period, the traditional Babylonian Akitu festival was an occasion for Greek-speaking kings to show that they were Babylonian and for Babylonian priests to gain significant power.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East written by Kiersten Neumann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 770 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook is a state-of-the-field volume containing diverse approaches to sensory experience, bringing to life in an innovative, remarkably vivid, and visceral way the lives of past humans through contributions that cover the chronological and geographical expanse of the ancient Near East. It comprises thirty-two chapters written by leading international contributors that look at the ways in which humans, through their senses, experienced their lives and the world around them in the ancient Near East, with coverage of Anatolia, Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Persia, from the Neolithic through the Roman period. It is organised into six parts related to sensory contexts: Practice, production, and taskscape; Dress and the body; Ritualised practice and ceremonial spaces; Death and burial; Science, medicine, and aesthetics; and Languages and semantic fields. In addition to exploring what makes each sensory context unique, this organisation facilitates cross-cultural and cross-chronological, as well as cross-sensory and multisensory comparisons and discussions of sensory experiences in the ancient world. In so doing, the volume also enables considerations of senses beyond the five-sense model of Western philosophy (sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell), including proprioception and interoception, and the phenomena of synaesthesia and kinaesthesia. The Routledge Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East provides scholars and students within the field of ancient Near Eastern studies new perspectives on and conceptions of familiar spaces, places, and practices, as well as material culture and texts. It also allows scholars and students from adjacent fields such as Classics and Biblical Studies to engage with this material, and is a must-read for any scholar or student interested in or already engaged with the field of sensory studies in any period.
Download or read book The Role of Women in Work and Society in the Ancient Near East written by Brigitte Lion and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-09-12 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economic history is well documented in Assyriology, thanks to the preservation of dozens of thousands of clay tablets recording administrative operations, contracts and acts dealing with family law. Despite these voluminous sources, the topic of work and the contribution of women have rarely been addressed. This book examines occupations involving women over the course of three millennia of Near Eastern history. It presents the various aspects of women as economic agents inside and outside of the family structure. Inside the family, women were the main actors in the production of goods necessary for everyday life. In some instances, their activities exceeded the simple needs of the household and were integrated within the production of large organizations or commercial channels. The contributions presented in this volume are representative enough to address issues in various domains: social, economic, religious, etc., from varied points of view: archaeological, historical, sociological, anthropological, and with a gender perspective. This book will be a useful tool for historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and graduate students interested in the economy of the ancient Near East and in women and gender studies.
Download or read book Rise of the Hyksos written by Anna-Latifa Mourad and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2015-10-31 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Manetho's obscure reference to a race of invaders has been a constant source of debate and controversy. This book assesses the rise to power of the Hyksos, exploring the preliminary stages that enabled them to gain control over a portion of Egyptian territory and thus to merit a small mention in Manetho's history.
Download or read book Constituent Confederate and Conquered Space written by Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mittani empire is one of the most enigmatic political structures in Mesopotamian history. Reconstructing the emergence and the organisation of this state, whose territory encompassed Upper Mesopotamia touching the Levant and the piedmont plains of the Zagros in the East at the height of its power, is exceedingly difficult. Cuneiform specialists, archeologists and historians discuss the Mittani state with regard to modes of spatial organisation co- and preexisting in the region.
Download or read book The Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran and the Concept of a Library written by Sidnie White Crawford and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-10-14 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran and the Concept of a Library explores the important question of whether or not the manuscripts found in the eleven caves near Qumran can be characterized as a “library.”
Download or read book The Amorites and the Bronze Age Near East written by Aaron A. Burke and published by . This book was released on 2021-01-27 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Aaron A. Burke explores the evolution of Amorite identity in the Near East from ca. 2500-1500 BC. He sets the emergence of a collective identity for the Amorites, one of the most famous groups in Ancient Near Eastern history, against the backdrop of both Akkadian imperial intervention and declining environmental conditions during this period. Tracing the migration of Amorite refugees from agropastoral communities into nearby regions, he shows how mercenarism in both Mesopotamia and Egypt played a central role in the acquisition of economic and political power between 2100 and 1900 BC. Burke also examines how the establishment of Amorite kingdoms throughout the Near East relied on traditional means of legitimation, and how trade, warfare, and the exchange of personnel contributed to the establishment of an Amorite koiné. Offering a fresh approach to identity at different levels of social hierarchy over time and space, this volume contributes to broader questions related to identity for other ancient societies.
Download or read book The Roots of Western Finance written by Thomas K. Park and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-05-24 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Roots of Western Finance: Power, Ethics, and Social Capital in the Ancient World, Thomas K. Park and James B. Greenberg take an anthropological approach to credit. They suggest that financial activities occur in a complex milieu, in which specific parties, with particular motives, achieve their goals using a form of social, cultural, or economic agency. They examine the imbrication of finance and hidden interests in Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, classical Greece and Rome, the early Judeo-Christian traditions, and the Islamic world to illuminate the ties between social, ethical, and financial institutions. This unique breadth of research provides new perspectives on Mesopotamian ways of incentivizing production through financial arrangements, the source of Egyptian surpluses, linguistics and usury, metrological influences on finance, and the enduring importance of honor and social capital. This book not only illustrates the particular cultural logics that drove these ancient economies, it also depicts how modern society’s financial techniques, ethics, and concerns with justice are attributable to a rich multicultural history.
Download or read book Libraries Before Alexandria written by Kim Ryholt and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019-08-15 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The creation of the Library of Alexandria is widely regarded as one of the great achievements in the history of humankind - a giant endeavour to amass all known literature and scholarly texts in one central location, so as to preserve it and make it available for the public. In turn, this event has been viewed as a historical turning point that separates the ancient world from classical antiquity. Standard works on the library continue to present the idea behind the institution as novel and, at least implicitly, as a product of Greek thought. Yet, although the scale of the collection in Alexandria seems to have been unprecedented, the notion of creating central repositories of knowledge, while perhaps new to Greek tradition, was age-old in the Near East where the building was erected. Here the existence of libraries can be traced back another two millennia, from the twenty-seventh century BCE to the third century CE, and so the creation of the Library in Alexandria was not so much the beginning of an intellectual adventure as the impressive culmination of a very long tradition. This volume presents the first comprehensive study of these ancient libraries across the 'Cradle of Civilization' and traces their institutional and scholarly roots back to the early cities and states and the advent of writing itself. Leading specialists in the intellectual history of each individual period and region covered in the volume present and discuss the enormous textual and archaeological material available on the early collections, offering a uniquely readable account intended for a broad audience of the libraries in Egypt and Western Asia as centres of knowledge prior to the famous Library of Alexandria.
Download or read book Tracing Gestures written by Amy J. Maitland Gardner and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-30 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the role of gestures in past societies, exploring both how meaning was communicated through bodily actions, and also how archaeologists can trace the symbolism and significance of ancient gestures, ritual practices and bodily techniques through the material remnants of past human groups. Gesture studies is an area of increasing interest within the social sciences, and the individual chapters not only respond to developments in the field, but push it forward by bringing a wide range of perspectives and approaches into dialogue with one another. Each exhibits a critical and reflexive approach to bodily communication and to re-tracing bodies through the archaeological record (in art, the treatment of the body and material culture), and together they demonstrate the diversity of pioneering global research on gestures in archaeology and related disciplines, with contributions from leading researchers in Aegean, Mediterranean, Mesoamerican, Japanese and Near Eastern archaeology. By bringing case studies from each of these different cultures and regions together and drawing on interdisciplinary insights from anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, design, art history and the performing arts, this volume reveals the similarities and differences in gestures as expressed in cultures around the world, and offers new and valuable perspectives on the nature of bodily communication across both space and time.
Download or read book Animals Ancestors and Ritual in Early Bronze Age Syria written by Glenn M. Schwartz and published by Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press. This book was released on 2024-02-01 with total page 722 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animals, Ancestors, and Ritual in Early Bronze Age Syria: An Elite Mortuary Complex from Umm el-Marra, edited by Johns Hopkins professor Glenn M. Schwartz, is a final report of the excavation of Tell Umm el-Marra in northern Syria, conducted in 1994-2010. It is likely the site of ancient Tuba, capital of a small kingdom in the Early and Middle Bronze periods, in the Jabbul plain between Aleppo and northern Mesopotamia. Its study advances our understanding of early Syrian complex society beyond the big cities of Antiquity. Of particular importance in the Early Bronze excavations are the results from the site necropolis, tombs of high-ranking persons containing objects of gold, silver, and lapis lazuli. Separate installations hold kungas (donkey x onager hybrids), sometimes along with human infants. This site provides the first archaeological attestation of the kunga equids, unique in the archaeology of third-millennium Syria and Mesopotamia.
