The roughly 5,000 cuneiform tablets from Ebla (3rd millennium BC) attest to the oldest Semitic language and provide insight into a period in the history of Syria that was previously unknown. Their res
This volume explores two topics of contemporary critical interest, agency and materiality, in the context of their intersection with the divine. Specific case studies, emphasizing the ancient Near Eas
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. D
This book provides an edition and study of the Ugaritic and Akkadian incantation and anti-witchcraft texts from Ugarit. All texts have been newly collated and are edited here alongside translations, h
Addressing the relationship between religion and ideology, and drawing on a range of literary, ritual, and visual sources, Beate Pongratz-Leisten argues that Assyria as a polity was as much exposed to
This volume assembles scholars working on cuneiform texts from different periods, genres, and areas to examine the range of social, cultural, and historical contexts in which specific types of texts c
Errors of many kinds abound in Akkadian writings, but this fact's far-reaching implications have never been unraveled and systematized. To attempt this is the aim of this book. Drawing on scholarship
This book studies the house of prisoners at the city of Uruk during the revolt against king Samsu-iluna (ca. 1741 1739 BC). The history of this period is not widely known and there is no previous comp
Scholars often assume that the nature of Mesopotamian kingship was such that questioning royal authority was impossible. This volume challenges that general assumption, by presenting an analysis of th
This volume focuses on the state ideology of imperial Assyria in the 9th century BCE, in particular on how power relations among the Mesopotamian deities, the Assyrian king, and the "foreign land
Despite siginificant advances in annual chronology, the Old Assyrian trade fundamentally lacked a regime of time at the level of the merchant’s commercial and personal activities. In this book, Stratf
The nucleus of his study is Greater Mesopotamia in the period 3500 to 500 BC, says Liverani, but it shades back to proto-historic and forward as far as Islamic times. Geographically it ranges from
Economic history is well documented in Assyriology thanks to the good preservation of numerous private and official archives; however, the contribution of women has seldom been addressed. This volume
Shulgi-simti is an important example of a woman involved in sponsoring religious activities though having a family life. An Ox of One’s Own will be of interest to Assyriologists, particularly those in
These essays represent a summation of Piotr Steinkeller's decades-long thinking and writing about the history of third millennium BCE Babylonia and the ways in which it is reflected in ancient histori
