Download or read book The Rape of Mesopotamia written by Lawrence Rothfield and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On April 10, 2003, as the world watched a statue of Saddam Hussein come crashing down in the heart of Baghdad, a mob of looters attacked the Iraq National Museum. Despite the presence of an American tank unit, the pillaging went unchecked, and more than 15,000 artifacts—some of the oldest evidence of human culture—disappeared into the shadowy worldwide market in illicit antiquities. In the five years since that day, the losses have only mounted, with gangs digging up roughly half a million artifacts that had previously been unexcavated; the loss to our shared human heritage is incalculable. With The Rape of Mesopotamia, Lawrence Rothfield answers the complicated question of how this wholesale thievery was allowed to occur. Drawing on extensive interviews with soldiers, bureaucrats, war planners, archaeologists, and collectors, Rothfield reconstructs the planning failures—originating at the highest levels of the U.S. government—that led to the invading forces’ utter indifference to the protection of Iraq’s cultural heritage from looters. Widespread incompetence and miscommunication on the part of the Pentagon, unchecked by the disappointingly weak advocacy efforts of worldwide preservation advocates, enabled a tragedy that continues even today, despite widespread public outrage. Bringing his story up to the present, Rothfield argues forcefully that the international community has yet to learn the lessons of Iraq—and that what happened there is liable to be repeated in future conflicts. A powerful, infuriating chronicle of the disastrous conjunction of military adventure and cultural destruction, The Rape of Mesopotamia is essential reading for all concerned with the future of our past.
Download or read book Famous Rapes written by Andrea Baker and published by . This book was released on 2019-11-22 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a simple truth that throughout history, certain rapes have become "famous." Old Master painters depicted sexual violence again and again, generally representing it as the transcendent work of heroes. Traditional Catholic stories teach that it is better to die during an attempted rape than it is to survive a completed one.In19th- and 20th-century America, notorious fear about the sexuality of black men wreaked havoc. From the days of Reconstruction through to the Central Park Jogger, wild accusations justified the literal and metaphoric lynching of men perceived as threats to white power. Meanwhile, a revolution did take place. Conversations became public. Laws changed. In 1974 it was legal in all fifty states to rape one's wife. By 1980, when a CBS movie of the week dramatized the first case of marital rape to come to trial, the depiction of events was told from the woman's point of view--she was the hero. By 1993, marital rape was illegal in all fifty states. Still, sexual assaults occurring in prisons remain comic fodder, and when our athletes rape, we remain unclear about whether a crime has been committed. Andrea Baker's project is to reflect on the history of how rape has been depicted.She draws images of sexual assault from both art history and contemporary visual culture, remaking them as spare white paper cutouts against a paper-packing-tape background. The swath of time from Mesopotamia to the present day is flattened and rolled out in unflinching continuity. As difficult as the material is, we do see progress within a history that is not always as distant we might prefer, and Baker is insistent that we celebrate our accomplishments, even as we continue to evolve.
Download or read book Greek Myths and Mesopotamia written by Charles Penglase and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-10-04 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mesopotamian influence on Greek mythology in literary works of the epic period is considerable - yet it is a largely unexplored field. In this book Charles Penglase investigates major Mesopotamian and Greek myths. His examination concentrates on journey myths. A major breakthrough is achieved in the recognition of the extent of Mesopotamian influence and in the understanding of the colourful myths involved. The results are of significant interest, especially to scholars and students of ancient Greek and Near Eastern religion and mythology.
Download or read book Against Our Will written by Susan Brownmiller and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-09-24 with total page 767 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVDIVSusan Brownmiller’s groundbreaking bestseller uncovers the culture of violence against women with a devastating exploration of the history of rape—now with a new preface by the author exposing the undercurrents of rape still present today/divDIV Rape, as author Susan Brownmiller proves in her startling and important book, is not about sex but about power, fear, and subjugation. For thousands of years, it has been viewed as an acceptable “spoil of war,” used as a weapon by invading armies to crush the will of the conquered. The act of rape against women has long been cloaked in lies and false justifications./divDIV It is ignored, tolerated, even encouraged by governments and military leaders, misunderstood by police and security organizations, freely employed by domineering husbands and lovers, downplayed by medical and legal professionals more inclined to “blame the victim,” and, perhaps most shockingly, accepted in supposedly civilized societies worldwide, including the United States./divDIV Against Our Will is a classic work that has been widely credited with changing prevailing attitudes about violence against women by awakening the public to the true and continuing tragedy of rape around the globe and throughout the ages./divDIV Selected by the New York Times Book Review as an Outstanding Book of the Year and included among the New York Public Library’s Books of the Century, Against Our Will remains an essential work of sociological and historical importance./divDIV/div/div
Download or read book Looting and Rape in Wartime written by Tuba Inal and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-04-11 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looting and Rape in Wartime examines the causes of the hundred-year gap between the prohibition against wartime looting and that against rape, theorizing the conditions necessary for the emergence of a global prohibition regime in which a particular practice is not tolerated.
Download or read book Heritage under Siege written by Joris Kila and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-06-07 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE BLUE SHIELD AWARD 2012! Drawing on the results of a multidisciplinary research a first comprehensive picture of cultural property protection involving the military is presented. Practical, legal and contemplative aspects are considered while presenting a fascinating new discipline in heritage related studies.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Archaeology written by Bethany Walker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 793 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born from the fields of Islamic art and architectural history, the archaeological study of the Islamic societies is a relatively young discipline. With its roots in the colonial periods of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, its rapid development since the 1980s warrants a reevaluation of where the field stands today. This Handbook represents for the first time a survey of Islamic archaeology on a global scale, describing its disciplinary development and offering candid critiques of the state of the field today in the Central Islamic Lands, the Islamic West, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. The international contributors to the volume address such themes as the timing and process of Islamization, the problems of periodization and regionalism in material culture, cities and countryside, cultural hybridity, cultural and religious diversity, natural resource management, international trade in the later historical periods, and migration. Critical assessments of the ways in which archaeologists today engage with Islamic cultural heritage and local communities closes the volume, highlighting the ethical issues related to studying living cultures and religions. Richly illustrated, with extensive citations, it is the reference work on the debates that drive the field today.
Download or read book Ancient Mesopotamia written by A. Leo Oppenheim and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-01-31 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This splendid work of scholarship . . . sums up with economy and power all that the written record so far deciphered has to tell about the ancient and complementary civilizations of Babylon and Assyria."—Edward B. Garside, New York Times Book Review Ancient Mesopotamia—the area now called Iraq—has received less attention than ancient Egypt and other long-extinct and more spectacular civilizations. But numerous small clay tablets buried in the desert soil for thousands of years make it possible for us to know more about the people of ancient Mesopotamia than any other land in the early Near East. Professor Oppenheim, who studied these tablets for more than thirty years, used his intimate knowledge of long-dead languages to put together a distinctively personal picture of the Mesopotamians of some three thousand years ago. Following Oppenheim's death, Erica Reiner used the author's outline to complete the revisions he had begun. "To any serious student of Mesopotamian civilization, this is one of the most valuable books ever written."—Leonard Cottrell, Book Week "Leo Oppenheim has made a bold, brave, pioneering attempt to present a synthesis of the vast mass of philological and archaeological data that have accumulated over the past hundred years in the field of Assyriological research."—Samuel Noah Kramer, Archaeology A. Leo Oppenheim, one of the most distinguished Assyriologists of our time, was editor in charge of the Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute and John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Chicago.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook on Art Crime written by Saskia Hufnagel and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 909 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook showcases studies on art theft, fraud and forgeries, cultural heritage offences and related legal and ethical challenges. It has been authored by prominent scholars, practitioners and journalists in the field and includes both overviews of particular art crime issues as well as regional and national case studies. It is one of the first scholarly books in the current art crime literature that can be utilised as an immediate authoritative reference source or teaching tool. It also includes a bibliographic guide to the current literature across interdisciplinary boundaries. Apart from legal, criminological, archeological and historical perspectives on theft, fraud and looting, this volume contains chapters on iconoclasm and graffiti, underwater cultural heritage, the trade in human remains and the trade, theft and forgery of papyri. The book thereby hopes to encourage scholars from a wider variety of disciplines to contribute their valuable knowledge to art crime research.
Download or read book Broken Timelines Book 2 Mesopotamia written by Jack Stornoway and published by Digital Ink Productions. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The current conventional Mesopotamian timeline of dynastic Mesopotamia is impossible. Believing in it means endorsing the idea the Egyptians lagged thousand years behind the Sumerians technologically during the Middle Kingdom. This timeline forces the bronze age Harappan civilization to have existed as recently as 1200 BC, even as an iron age civilization had existed on the Ganges since at least 1800 BC. It is also not what the ancient Sumerians actually recorded, so believing it means believing that modern Assyriologists know more about ancient Sumer than the ancient Sumerians themselves. Given that the ancient Sumerians lived through it, and all Assyriologists have to go on is random bits of clay-tablets and mostly ruined city-mounds, this seems like an incredible stretch of the imagination. The fact is Assyriologists cant' and don't need to explain the anachronisms, because the Mesopotamian timeline is synchronized with the Egyptian timeline, which Egyptologists insist on keeping as short as possible. The idea that the ancient Sumerians built their earliest cities in the marshlands of Southern Iraq using stone imported from other countries is entirely illogical, they would have simply built them using mud-bricks as they did in the later periods. As the stone had to have been locally quarried, the region could not have been a marshland when the earliest cities built, meaning that the oldest levels of Uruk and Eridu must date back to before the region began turning into a marshland circa 9,000 years ago. The fact that they switched to using mud-bricks simply proves that the water-levels rose during the course of Sumerian history, flooding their farmlands, and ultimately forcing the Mesopotamian cultures to migrate northward to Akkadia, Babylonia, and Assyria. The fact that Assyriologists ignore the ancient Sumerian records of the antediluvian era is probably for the best, as they cannot even accept that the 1st Kish Dynasty went back to 25,000 BC, even though it has been proven that grains was being farmed in the region at that time. Unfortunately, the timeline of Egypt and Sumer are the two pillars that ancient history is built around. As the early Sumerians were trading with the early Egyptians, Assyriologists have been forced to synchronize the Mesopotamian timeline with the preposterous timeline used by Egyptologists. While this means that most of Sumerian history is has to be ignored, is also effects the timelines of all other Eurasian cultures in contact with the Mesopotamian. The Harappan civilization of ancient India was trading with the Sumerians throughout its history and went into decline around the end of the Sumero-Akkadian dynastic period, which means the entire Harappan civilization is forced to correlate with the short Conventional Mesopotamian Timeline. This forced the entire Harappan timeline into a period of 2000 years, even though some of the archaeological sites in Pakistan and India have been carbon-dated back to over 8000 BC. These broken timelines then fan out further pulling the Minoans and Greeks, Iranians, and Chinese into this confusing mess.
Download or read book The Loss of Male Sexual Desire in Ancient Mesopotamia written by Gioele Zisa and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-11-22 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After more than fifty years since the last publication, the cuneiform texts relating to the treatment of the loss of male sexual desire and vigor in Mesopotamia are collected in this volume. The aim of the book is to present Mesopotamian medical tradition regarding the so-called nīš libbi therapies. šà-zi-ga in Sumerian, nīš libbi in Akkadian, lit. "raising of the 'heart'", is the expression used to indicate a group of texts intended to recover the male sexual desire. This medical tradition is preserved from the Middle Babylonian period to the Achaemenid one. This broad range testifies to the importance of the transmission of this material throughout Mesopotamian history. The book provides the edition of this textual corpus and analyzes it in the light of new knowledge on ancient Near Eastern medicine. Moreover, this volume aims to show how theories and methodologies of Cultural Anthropology, Ethnopsychiatry and Gender Studies are useful for understanding the Mesopotamian medical system. This edition is an important tool for understanding Mesopotamian medical knowledge for Assyriologist, however since the texts have been translated and discussed using the anthropological and gender perspectives they are accessible also to scholars of other research fields, such as History of Medicine, Sexuality and Gender.
Download or read book Ancient Mesopotamian Religion and Mythology written by W.G. Lambert and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2016-03-17 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The late W.G. Lambert (1926-2011) was one of the foremost Assyriologists of the latter part of the twentieth century. His principle legacy is a large number of superb critical editions of Babylonian literary compositions. Many of the texts he edited were on religious and mythological subjects. He will always be remembered as the editor of the Babylonian Job (Ludlul bel nemeqi, also known as the Poem of the Righteous Sufferer), the Babylonian Flood Story (Atra-hasis) and the Babylonian Creation Epic (Enuma elish). The present book is a collection of twenty-three essays Lambert published between the years 1958 and 2004. These endure not only as the legacy of one of the greatest authorities on ancient Mesopotamian religion and mythology, but also because each makes statements of considerable validity and importance. As such, many are milestones in the fields of Mesopotamian religion and mythology.
Download or read book Cultural Heritage in the Crosshairs written by Joris Kila and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-05-15 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The protection of cultural property during times of armed conflict and social unrest has been an on-going challenge for military forces throughout the world even after the ratification and implementation of the 1954 Hague Convention and its two Protocols by participating nations. This volume provides a series of case studies and “lessons learned” to assess the current status of Cultural Property Protection (CPP) and the military, and use that information to rethink the way forward. The contributors are all recognized experts in the field of military CPP or cultural heritage and conflict, and all are actively engaged in developing national and international solutions for the protection and conservation of these non-renewable resources and the intangible cultural values that they represent.
Download or read book Greek Myths and Mesopotamia written by Charles Penglase and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-10-04 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the Mesopotamian influence on Greek mythology in literary works of the epic period, concentrating in particular on journey myths. A major contribution to the understanding of the colourful myths involved.
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 Red Tent written by Anita Diamant and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-09-18 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Intensely moving . . . feminist . . . a riveting tale of love’ - Observer Her name is Dinah. In the Bible, her fate is merely hinted at in a brief and violent detour within the verses of the Book of Genesis that recount the life of Jacob and his infamous dozen sons. Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent is an extraordinary and engrossing tale of ancient womanhood and family honour. Told in Dinah’s voice, it opens with the story of her mothers – the four wives of Jacob – each of whom embodies unique feminine traits, and concludes with Dinah’s own startling and unforgettable story of betrayal, grief and love. Deeply affecting and intimate, The Red Tent is a feminist classic which combines outstandingly rich storytelling with an original insight into women’s society in a fascinating period of early history. Such is its warmth and candour, it is guaranteed to win the hearts and minds of women across the world.
Download or read book Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature written by Dr Gwendolyn Leick and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature is a new contribution to current debates about sex and eroticism. It gives an insight into Mesopotamian attitudes to sexuality by examining the oldest preserved written evidence on the subject - the Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform sources - which were written between the 21st and the 5th centuries B.C. Using these long-neglected and often astonishing data, Gwendolyn Leick is able to anlayse Mesopotamian views of prostitution, love magic and deviant sexual behaviour as well as more general issues of sexuality and gender. This fascinating book sheds light on the sexual culture of one of the earliest literate civilisations.
