Brief overview of the visual and linguistic evidence for the value of minerals and colours in ancient Mesopotamia

Brief overview of the visual and linguistic evidence for the value of minerals and colours in ancient Mesopotamia

The brief notice of Absalom’s pillar in 2 Sam 18:18 provides an important yet un-usual case of how memory is constructed in ancient Israel and the Hebrew Bible. Commemoration of the dead typically works from the perspective of the (living) descendent and is directed towards the (deceased) ancestor. Yet in this example Absalom commemorates h…[Read more]

We analyze the processing of cereals and its role at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe, southeastern Anatolia (10th / 9th millennium BC), a site that has aroused much debate in archaeological discourse.

Behind the literary form of testament and expressions memorializing the dead is a concept of how objects, rights, and speech pass from one generation to the next: transmission. This essay examines two interrelated phenomena that give filial succession in the biblical and Ugaritic literature its contours: first, the discourses surrounding…[Read more]

Creative non-fiction/semi-academic reflective piece on seeing Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night for the first time in person at the Museum of Modern Arts.

Studies of Egyptian Late Period statuary often assume that the extant corpus is a representative sample of the artistic output of the Twenty-Sixth to Thirty-First Dynasties (c. 664–332 BCE). This assumption ignores the various human processes that affect the survival of statues after their initial dedication. In particular, the Roman practice of c…[Read more]

The present study draws on interdisciplinary research to establish an interpretative framework for an analysis of the material and textual evidence concerning infant loss in ancient Mesopotamia (c. 3000-500 BCE). This approach rejects the notion that highinfant mortality rates result in widespread parental indifference to infant loss, arguing…[Read more]

The meaning of the Akkadian term ṭuppi has been hotly debated by Assyriologists for the greater part of a century. The present article argues that ṭuppi, commonly found in temporal expressions, can only refer to a one-year period. This proposal arises out of the observation that, among a substantial corpus of Neo-Babylonian house rental con…[Read more]

A lexicon like the Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon 1815–1950 (Austrian Biographical Dictionary) seems to be as all in one cast because it is built on a set of formal rules for writing articles and some strict but basic criteria for the incorporation of new entries. The human reader can find information within that resource to a wide ra…[Read more]

This article discusses the identity of the Daniel character mentioned in the Book of Ezekiel.

This article discusses the identity of the Daniel character mentioned in the Book of Ezekiel.

A discussion of the different lists of Canaanite nations.

This article is a detailed review of Constructions of Space III: Biblical Spatiality and the Sacred, ed. Jorunn Økland, J. Cornelis de Vos, and Karen J. Wenell (Bloomsbury, 2016); and The King and the Land: A Geography of Royal Power in the Biblical World, by Stephen C. Russell (Oxford University Press, 2017).

A short paper describing recent research in the area of EF1 at Polis Chrysochous on Cyprus.

This chapter explores the prose traditions in the Writings under the broad division between historiography and storytelling. While 1–2 Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah make use of archival sources and possibly genuine first-person accounts, these materials are arranged and subsumed under an ideological umbrella—much like contemporaneous Greek his…[Read more]

Cuneiform scholarly practices systematized an exploration of mean- ing potential. In cuneiform scholarship, knowledge making emerged from multiple scribal practices, most notably list-making, analogical reasoning, and translation. The present paper demonstrates how multilingualism stands at the core of cuneiform scholarly inquiry, enabling…[Read more]

Study on the role played by material characterised by ‘western’ features in the late palatial and post palatial Aegean

This article discusses the reason behind Jeroboam, king of Israel, instituting a holiday in the eighth month of calendar. We suggest an approach that looks at this holiday as misplaced from the seventh month by means of an additional unauthorized leap-month.