Search results for ""institute for the study of ancient cultures""

The author lays out the early Ptolemaic tax system, describes the changes in the capitation taxes during the reign of Ptolemy II, discusses the other state and temple revenues, and then reconstructs the prosopography and provenance of thirty-nine tax payers whose names occur frequently in these initial studies. Having set the stage, the author then provides editions of sixty-one ostraca from Harold Nelson's collection that include an important group of early Ptolemaic Demotic, Greek, and bilingual ostraca, mostly tax receipts. One late Ptolemaic account ostracon (Cat. no. 3) is also published here since it concerns the business of choachytes, who figure prominently in the group of early Ptolemaic ostraca. The book concludes with full indices, and each of the ostraca is illustrated in drawing and photograph.

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The Hittite language is the earliest preserved member of the Indo-European family of languages. It was written on clay tablets in central Asia Minor over a five hundred year span (ca. 1650-1180 B.C.) which witnessed the rise, the floruit, and the decline of many political powers in the Near East. The Hittite Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CHD) is a comprehensive, bilingual Hittite-English dictionary. The CHD is not just a list of words and their meanings, but rather a dictionary that reflects and illustrates the ideas and material world of Hittite society through its lexicon. Published letter by letter, the CHD is a long-term project and the result of a painstaking process of cultural, historical, and lexical investigation for all those interested in Hittite culture and history. The CHD is the only such project in the English speaking world.

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This Festschrift in honor of Prof. Edward F. Wente contains contributions by forty-three of his colleagues and friends. Contents: Publications and Communications of Edward F. Wente ( C. E. Jones ); A Monument of Khaemwaset Honoring Imhotep ( J. P. Allen ); Feuds or Vengeance? Rhetoric and Social Forms ( J. Baines ); Theban Seventeenth Dynasty ( J. von Beckerath ); Inventory Offering Lists and the Nomenclature for Boxes and Chests in the Old Kingdom ( E. Brovarski ); A Case for Narrativity: Gilt Stucco Mummy Cover in the Graeco-Roman Museum, Alexandria, Inv. 27808 ( L. H. Corcoran ); Opening of the Mouth as Temple Ritual ( E. Cruz-Uribe ); A Letter of Reproach ( R. J. Demaree ); Creation on the Potter's Wheel at the Eastern Horizon of Heaven ( P. F. Dorman ); The Border and the Yonder Side ( G. Englund ); Enjoying the Pleasures of Sensation: Reflections on a Significant Feature of Egyptian Religion ( R. B. Finnestad ); Some Comments on Khety's Instruction for Little Pepi on His Way to School (Satire on the Trades) ( J. L. Foster ); On Fear of Death and the Three bwts Connected with Hathor ( P. J. Frandsen ); Two Inlaid Inscriptions of the Earliest Middle Kingdom ( H. Goedicke ); Historical Background to the Exodus: Papyrus Anastasi VIII ( S. I. Groll ); The Mummy of Amenhotep III ( J. E. Harris ); Fragmentary Quartzite Female Hand Found in Abou-Rawash ( Z. Hawass ); Two Stelae of King Seqenenre Djehuty-aa of the Seventeenth Dynasty ( H. Jacquet-Gordon ); A Marital Title from the New Kingdom ( J. J. Janssen ); Remarks on Continuity in Egyptian Literary Tradition ( R. Jasnow ); Ethnic Considerations in Persian Period Egypt ( J. H. Johnson ); The nfrw-Collar Reconsidered ( W. R. Johnson ); The Wealth of Amun of Thebes under Ramesses II ( K. A. Kitchen ); Wie jung ist die memphitische Philosophie auf dem Shabaqo-Stein? ( R. Krauss ); 'Listening' to the Ancient Egyptian Woman: Letters, Testimonials, and Other Expressions of Self ( B. S. Lesko ); Some Further Thoughts on Chapter 162 of the Book of the Dead ( L. H. Lesko ); Royal Iconography of Dynasty 0 ( T. J. Logan ); The Auction of Pharaoh ( J. G. Manning ); Semi-Literacy in Egypt: Some Erasures from the Amarna Period ( P. Der Manuelian ); Vinegar at Deir el-Medina ( N. B. Millet ); Observations on Pre-Amarna Theology during the Earliest Reign of Amenhotep IV ( W. J. Murnane ); Zum Kultbildritual in Abydos ( J. Osing ); Sportive Fencing as a Ritual for Destroying the Enemies of Horus ( P. A. Piccione ); An Oblique Reference to the Expelled High Priest Osorkon? ( R. K. Ritner ); The Ahhotep Coffins: The Archaeology of an Egyptological Reconstruction ( A. M. Roth ); A Litany from the Eighteenth Dynasty Tomb of Merneith ( D. P. Silverman ); Nag-ed-Deir Papyri ( W. K. Simpson ); O. Hess = O. Naville = O. BM 50601: An Elusive Text Relocated ( M. J. Smith ); Celibacy and Adoption among God's Wives of Amun and Singers in the Temple of Amun: A Re-examination of the Evidence ( E. Teeter ); New Kingdom Temples at Elkab ( C. C. Van Siclen III ); Menstrual Synchrony and the 'Place of Women' in Ancient Egypt (OIM 13512) ( T. G. Wilfong ); Serra East and the Mission of the Middle Kingdom Fortresses in Nubia ( B. B. Williams ); End of the Late Bronze Age and Other Crisis Periods: A Volcanic Cause? ( F. J. Yurco ).

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Nearly twenty-eight years after the completion of the first five seasons at the Chogha Mish site in Iran, the first of the final reports is now available. The site turned out to be highly significant for the wide range of protoliterate and prehistoric artifacts found there. These volumes examine and lavishly illustrate the excavations and finds.

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Bringing together scholars working in a wide variety of disciplines and time periods, from prehispanic Mesoamerica and Early Historic India to the Assyrian Empire and papal Rome, this book takes a bottom-up approach to evaluating the risks and rewards of acting politically correctly or incorrectly in the ancient world.

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The History' of the Armenian priest Lewond is an important source for the history of early Islamic rule and the only contemporary chronicle of 2nd/8th-century caliphal rule in Armenia. This book is a new annotated English translation of Lewond's text, which describes events during the century and a half following the Prophet Muhammad's death.

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The cross-cultural studies in this volume reexamine the role of irrigation in early states. Ranging geographically from South America and the southwestern United States to North Africa, the Middle East and Asia, they describe the physical attributes and environments of early irrigation systems; various methods for empirical investigation of ancient irrigation; and irrigation's economic, sociopolitical and cosmological dimensions. Through their interdisciplinary perspectives, the authors--all experts in the field of irrigation studies--advance both methodological and theoretical approaches to understanding irrigation in early civilizations. Irrigation has long been of interest in the study of the past. Many early civilizations were located in river valleys, and irrigation was of great economic importance for many early states because of the key role it played in producing an agricultural surplus, which was the main source of wealth and the basis of political power for the elites who controlled it. Agricultural surplus was also necessary to maintain the very features of statehood, such as urbanism, full-time labour specialization, state institutions and status hierarchy. Yet the presence of large-scale or complex irrigation systems does not necessarily mean that they were under centralised control. While some early states organised the construction, operation and maintenance of irrigation works and resolved conflicts related to water distribution, other early governments left most of the management to local farmers and controlled only the surplus. With colour illustrations

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This volume of the Hittite Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CHD) is the complete volume of the letter S (-sa to suu-), including fascicles 1-4. The CHD is a comprehensive, bilingual Hittite-English dictionary. The CHD is not just a list of words and their meanings, but rather an encyclopedic dictionary that reflects and illustrates the ideas and material world of Hittite society through its lexicon. Published letter by letter, the CHD is a long-term project and the result of a painstaking process of cultural, historical, and lexical investigation for all those interested in Hittite culture and history. The CHD is the only such project in the English speaking world.

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This is the fourth and final fascicle of the letter S (-sma/i- A. to suu). The CHD is a comprehensive, bilingual Hittite-English dictionary. The CHD is not just a list of words and their meanings, but rather an encyclopedic dictionary that reflects and illustrates the ideas and material world of Hittite society through its lexicon. Published letter by letter, the CHD is a long-term project and the result of a painstaking process of cultural, historical, and lexical investigation for all those interested in Hittite culture and history. The CHD is the only such project in the English speaking world.

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Part One: Text Part Two: Catalog and Plates This set of two volumes presents the final report of the four archaeological campaigns carried out by the Oriental Institute at the site of Chatal Hoyuk in the Amuq (currently Hatay, Turkey) under the directorship of Ian McEwan and Robert Braidwood, more than eighty years after their field operations. The excavation's documents (daily journals, original drawings, photos, lists of objects, and letters) stored in the Oriental Institute Archives, as well as the approximately 13,000 small finds and pottery sherds from the site currently kept at the Oriental Institute Museum, provided the necessary dataset for the analysis presented here. This dataset allowed the author to reconstruct the life of a village which survived the political turmoil in the period from the Late Bronze Age to the end of the Iron Age (16th-6th centuries bc). If Chatal Hoyuk was during the Late Bronze Age a village in the provincial part of a large empire (Hittite), it became a large independent town in a small but powerful new political entity (Walistin) during the Iron Age I and II, before being conquered by the Assyrian Empire. In this extended publication of small finds and pottery, many previously unpublished materials are made available to both general readers and scholars for the first time. The material culture discussed and analyzed here offers the chance to trace changes and continuity in the site's domestic activities, to point out shifts in cultural contacts over a long period of time, and to monitor the construction of a new community identity. 198 plates, 125 figures, 7 tables

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The monograph offers a large number of unpublished text fragments in photo and transliteration and gives succinct philological notes to these fragments. The fragments are part of a large collection that had been found during the early German campaigns at the Hittite capital Hattusa before the Second World War. The fragments were taken to the Staatliche Museen in Berlin (which fell to Eastern Germany after the war) and were finally returned by the German Democratic Republic to Turkey (the Museum of Ancient Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara) in the year 1987. They were then divided among a team of eminent Turkish Hittitologists under the supervision of Sedat Alp, but most of the pieces remained unpublished. Following a decision of the Turkish Ministry of Culture in 2010, a new team was formed, partly consisting of members of the former team, but also supplemented by several Turkish Hittitologists of the younger generation. The author of the present monograph is one of these new team members. Oguz Soysal is an experienced Hittitologist and the author of a number of important publications, which received much attention in the field. In more than one case he has already dealt with unpublished fragments, and on these occasions he has shown himself to be a skilled editor of new texts. As a collaborator of the Hittite Dictionary of the University of Chicago, Soysal was able to draw upon the rich lexical files of this project in order to assign fragments to a text or even join them together with other fragments. Soysal provides photographs and transliterations of each piece. This is a very felicitous decision. Photos offer the users of his book all the information needed on the sign forms of the fragments, and the transliterations show how Soysal has interpreted those signs. Wherever necessary, Soysal gives philological notes to explain certain forms or to present relevant text variants. Each fragment, if possible, is accompanied by information on its assignment to a Hittite text or text genre, the date of the composition, the fragment's measurements, and previous bibliography. After the presentation of the fragments highly useful indexes on onomastics and lexicographical matters close the book.

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Matthew Wolfgang Stolper began working for the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary in 1978 and became full professor in the Oriental Institute 1987, focusing on Neo-Babylonian and Middle Elamite. Matt has worked tirelessly to raise the necessary funding, to assemble a team of scholars, to promote the importance of the Persepolis Fortification Archive to academic and popular audiences, and most significantly, to concisely, passionately, and convincingly place the Persepolis Archives in their Achaemenid, ancient Near Eastern, and modern geo-political contexts. The twenty-six papers from Stolper's colleagues, friends, and students show the breadth of his interests.

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The Oriental Institute Annual Reports contain yearly summaries of the activities of the Institutes faculty, staff, and research projects, as well as descriptions of special events and other Institute functions.

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This is a presentation of beautiful colored mosaics. They originate from buildings in the oasis of Jericho and all date from the first half of the eighth century, during the time of Umayyad caliphate of the early Islamic period. Many visitors have had the privilege of seeing the mosaics revealed, but no one has experienced the impact of all these pavements since they were first excavated in the 1930s and 1940s. A few have been published, but the presentation in Hamilton and Grabar (Khirbat al Mafjar: An Arabian Mansion in the Jordan Valley, 1959) is only very fine aquarelle paintings from the originals. In 2010 the Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage uncovered, cleaned, and assessed the state of conservation of these mosaics. A series of high-quality digital photographs was prepared by a team from the Department, composed of M. Diab, N. Khatib, Said Ghazal, Rafaat Sharaia, and I. Hamdan, under the direction of ?. Taha, from which the present selection is offered for study and appreciation of this triumph in early Islamic art. These images speak for themselves.

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The Paleolithic site of Barda Balka ("standing stone," "stone to lean upon" in local Kurdish) is situated about 3 kilometers northeast of Chemchemal in Kirkuk Province, Iraq. Until recent years, the site was marked by a natural monolith of limestone conglomerate 3.5 meters high on a rather barren slope partly littered with Acheulean-type bifaces, pebble tools, cores, and flake artifacts. The site was discovered in 1949 by members of the Directorate General of Antiquities of Iraq while on archaeological reconnaissance in the district. In 1951, during a field season of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago under the direction of Robert J. Braidwood (which not only conducted the excavations at nearby Jarmo and Karim Shahir but also carried out wider geological and prehistoric reconnaissance in the extended Chemchemal Valley area), Barda Balka was visited and further studied by Herbert E. Wright Jr. of the University of Minnesota Department of Geology and Bruce Howe, then of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University. Wright and Howe returned shortly thereafter to conduct a four-day sounding campaign of trenching and localized geological investigations. This volume is Howe's final report of these investigations at Barda Balka.

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The ninth published volume of twelve, presenting the whole work off the Oriental Institute's Iraq Expedition in the Diyala region. This volume focuses on Ishchali (usually identified as ancient Neribtum), which belonged to the independent kingdom of Eshnunna. The bulk of the report is devoted to the Kititum Temple.

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Human and animal figurines and other clay objects from the Oriental Institute's continuing work on Neolithic sites in Turkey and Iran.

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The Hittite language is the earliest preserved member of the Indo-European family of languages. It was written on clay tablets in central Asia Minor over a five hundred year span (ca. 1650-1180 B.C.) which witnessed the rise, the floruit, and the decline of many political powers in the Near East. The Hittite Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CHD) is a comprehensive, bilingual Hittite-English dictionary. The CHD is not just a list of words and their meanings, but rather a dictionary that reflects and illustrates the ideas and material world of Hittite society through its lexicon. Published letter by letter, the CHD is a long-term project and the result of a painstaking process of cultural, historical, and lexical investigation for all those interested in Hittite culture and history. The CHD is the only such project in the English speaking world.

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The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary was conceived to provide more than lexical information alone, more than a one-to-one equivalent between Akkadian and English words. By presenting each word in a meaningful context, often with a full and idiomatic translation, it recreates the cultural milieu and in many ways assumes the function of an encyclopedia.

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The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary was conceived to provide more than lexical information alone, more than a one-to-one equivalent between Akkadian and English words. By presenting each word in a meaningful context, often with a full and idiomatic translation, it recreates the cultural milieu and in many ways assumes the function of an encyclopedia.

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A report on the excavation during the 1950s of an Early Dynastic Temple discovered in the northwestern part of the Religious Quarter of Nippur. The volume includes reports on the structural remains, the burials and the finds, such as pottery, tablets, seals, ornaments and figurines.

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Ptolemais of the Libyan Pentapolis was founded in the second half of the third century B.C., probably early in the reign of Ptolemy III, on a site that had already been occupied for almost three centuries by the anonymous 'harbor at Barca.' Extensive remains of Ptolemais have always been visible and a careful plan of them was made by the Beechey brothers in 1822. Between 1935 and 1942 a number of sites including the Street of the Monuments, the Square of the Cisterns, the Palazzo delle Colonne, the Fortress Church, and the Tower Tomb were cleared and studied by the Italians under Professor Giacomo Caputo; and three more buildings, a villa of the early Roman period, a public building on the Street of the Monuments and the City Bath of the Byzantine period, were examined in detail by the Oriental Institute of Chicago under Professor Carl Kraeling between 1956 and 1958. The purpose of the present volume is twofold: to present detailed excavation reports on these last three buildings, and also to attempt a survey of Ptolemais as a whole on the basis of a thorough re-examination of the site carried out by the Institute. This was something well worth doing and generally speaking it has been well done. Even if some of the conclusions reached here must inevitably be regarded as provisional, we now have a broad and solid foundation on which future investigators can build, and for which they will be grateful. [From a review by D. E. L. Haynes in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 52 (1966) 195].

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Pioneer to the Past tells the intensely human, often poignantly moving story of the brilliant career of James Henry Breasted, one of the greatest Egyptologists and archaeologists America has produced. Breasted's greatest achievement was the founding of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago in 1919, through the generous support of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The Oriental Institute embodies Breasted's vision of an inter-disciplinary research center that unites archaeology, textual studies and art history as three complementary methodologies to provide a holistic understanding of ancient Near Eastern civilizations, and the ways that they laid the foundations for what we think of today as "Western civilization." Breasted's legacy continues to flourish today. Reprint of the Scribner's Sons 1943 Edition, with New Foreword and Photographs. Now available in paperback

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This book explores what the Book of the Dead was to the ancient Egyptians, what it means to us today, what it was believed to do, how it worked, how it was made, and ultimately what happened to it. Edited by Foy Scalf, PhD, this volume includes fourteen essays showcasing the latest research on the Book of the Dead written by thirteen internationally renown experts as well as a complete catalog of the forty-five objects on display in an associated exhibit at the Oriental Institute Museum. Two famous Book of the Dead papyri, Papyrus Milbank and Papyrus Ryerson, are reproduced in their entirety with full-color photographs among nearly 400 illustrations for the first time. Discover how the ancient Egyptians controlled their immortal destiny and sought close association with the gods through the Book of the Dead.

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The Oriental Institute Annual Reports contain yearly summaries of the activities of the Institutes faculty, staff, and research projects, as well as descriptions of special events and other Institute functions. The reports are complimentary to Members and Donors of the Oriental Institute.

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Robert Kriech Ritner revolutionized our views of ancient Egyptian religion and helped launch a renaissance in the study of magic in the ancient world. This volume presents twenty-seven essays in his honour, covering the latest groundbreaking research in Egyptology and beyond.

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The Oriental Institute Annual Reports contain yearly summaries of the activities of the Institutes faculty, staff, and research projects, as well as descriptions of special events and other Institute functions.

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A study of one of the Qumran texts, examining its characteristics and authorship. The author concludes that the Temple Scroll was an eschatalogical law book, composed around 150 BC by `The Teacher of Righteousness' and not a product of the Qumran community.

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The second of the preliminary reports on work at Nippur, this volume also gives details of the remains of a series of temples in Area WA and the administrative and residential buildings in Area WB. Included are important treatments of the pottery of the Old Babylonian and Kassite periods, as well as hoards of cuneiform tablets and Islamic silver coins.

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As the first of the final reports related to the current program of research at Nippur, this volume is crucial for understanding the Kassite assemblage at Nippur, especially for ceramics. This monograph emends and expands the assemblage that appeared in preliminary reports and details the construction and rebuildings of a large Kassite private house near the western city wall (Area WC-1), which furnished information on Kassite architectural practice as well as unanticipated patterning in intramural burials. Cuneiform texts, though mostly fragmentary and almost all from secondary contexts, allow some suggestions on the occupants of the sequence of houses and their activities. The plates include photographs of all the texts. An introductory chapter reconsiders the evidence for the correct orientation of the famous "Kassite" city map. Faunal reports are given in the appendices.

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The Hittite language is the earliest preserved member of the Indo-European family of languages. It was written on clay tablets in central Asia Minor over a five hundred year span (ca. 1650-1180 B.C.) which witnessed the rise, the floruit, and the decline of many political powers in the Near East. The Hittite Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CHD) is a comprehensive, bilingual Hittite-English dictionary. The CHD is not just a list of words and their meanings, but rather a dictionary that reflects and illustrates the ideas and material world of Hittite society through its lexicon. Published letter by letter, the CHD is a long-term project and the result of a painstaking process of cultural, historical, and lexical investigation for all those interested in Hittite culture and history. The CHD is the only such project in the English speaking world.

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After a decade-long hiatus in the years of World War II, archaeological fieldwork was resumed in Iran in 1948. In that year, the Oriental Institute returned to its long tradition of archaeological research by sending Donald McCown to the lowlands of southwestern Iran to conduct a series of surface surveys to find a multi-period site for excavation. For his survey, McCown chose the Ram Hormuz region, southeast of lowland Susiana and the region south and east of the provincial town of Ahvaz down to the Persian Gulf. McCown recorded 118 sites in the Ram Hormuz and Ahvaz areas and eventually chose for excavation the large prehistoric mound complex Tall-e Geser. Three months of excavation in 1948 and 1949 yielded materials that were kept in Chicago for many years. Apart from short articles, the site was never fully published. In Part 1 of this two-part volume, Abbas Alizadeh and colleagues have undertaken a final publication of the site. This task was undertaken because of a number of important considerations. First, the excavations at Geser have been cited as justifying the division of the Uruk period in southwestern Iran into Early, Middle, and Late phases. Second, Geser remains the only systematically excavated site in the Ram Hormuz region - a strategic location between the Susiana and Mesopotamian alluvium and the Zagros highlands of southwestern Iran. Third, Geser has produced a very extensive body of archaeological materials dating to the comparatively less understood proto-Elamite period, roughly the first few centuries of the third millennium bc. And finally, with the exception of a 700-800-year gap following the proto-Elamite phase, Geser remains one of the only sites in the Near East to have a very long and generally uninterrupted depositional sequence, in this case spanning from the fifth millennium BC to the Safavid period. The site's crucial location, its importance in the archaeological literature, and its long stratigraphic sequence made it imperative that the original excavation results from Geser be published in anticipation of a time when the site can be re-excavated. Part 2 of this volume presents the results of regional surveys conducted in the Ram Hormuz plain from 2005 to 2008, which were undertaken by Alizadeh and colleagues with the goal of understanding the semi-nomadic, mobile component of lowland Susiana and its hinterlands through time.

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Contained herein are 25 articles (20 in English, 5 in Hebrew) that, like the academic oeuvre of volume's honoree, span a broad array of topics within the fields of Hebraica, Judaica, and Biblica. The specific categories represented and the contributions they contain are: biography (Joel L. Kraemer presents a portrait of the honoree; Walter E. Kaegi shares personal reminiscences of Carl Herman Kraeling); text editions and translations, with analysis (Haggai Ben-Shammai analyzes and publishes a partial editio princeps of one of the early Judeao-Arabic endeavors to achieve a rapprochement between biblical and Graeco-Arab philosophy; Paul B. Fenton analyzes and publishes the editio princeps of a newly identified esoteric epistle from the hand of David II Maimondies; Mordechai A. Friedman analyzes and offers some new insights on four Geniza letters concerning the transfer of money to the well-known litterateur Judah ha-Levi; Israel M. Sandman analyzes and presents a critical edition of four fragments from Abraham Bar Hayya's Book of Intercalation that represent his harmonization of science and biblical exegesis; Michael G. Wechsler presents an editio princeps of 10 newly identified fragments of Saadia Gaon's commentary on the book of Esther as well an analysis and translation of those fragments, accompanied by an inventory of all known fragments of Saadia's commentary on that book); grammar/lexicography (Joshua Blau surveys certain vocables in Classical Arabic that sometimes have a different meaning in Judaeo-Arabic), exegesis, philosophy, theology, and polemics (Elinoar Bareket surveys the factors underlying the tendency of medieval Jewish writers to identify the names of biblical people and places with contemporary equivalents; Rachel Elior examines the Jewish realm of memory surrounding the Day of Atonement; Nahem Ilan analyzes Saadia Gaon's interpretation of Proverbs 30:10-17 with a view to his anti-Karaite polemical tendency, providing as well a structural outline of Saadia's introduction to Proverbs; Eve Krakowski considers the Karaite view of the history of the biblical text and the relevance of this view to their own collective self-conception, including a critical reassessment of the view that the Karaites were influenced by certain Dead Sea Scroll texts; Abraham Lipshitz critically assesses the notion that Abraham ibn Ezra held to a Philonic view of an infinitely durative rather than completed act of creation; Meira Polliack analyzes the relationship between Yefet b. Eli and Daniel al-Q?mis? in their exegetical approaches to biblical prophecy); history of modern scholarship (María Angeles Gallego presents an overview of the stages of modern European research -- beginning in the 18th century -- on medieval Judaeo-Arabic, with specific emphasis on Iberian Spanish scholarship), Jewish socio-cultural history (Moshe Gil provides a glimpse into the state of food commerce in the Geniza community from the evidence of merchants' letters; Joshua Holo considers the evidence for Gershom b. Judah's Italian extraction and its relevance for understanding the origin of Ashkenazic Jewish culture; Benjamin Z. Kedar evaluates the evidence for the timing of the relocation of the Tiberian Yeshiva first to Ramla and then to Jerusalem; Norman A. Stillman provides a comparative survey of the Islamic and Jewish perspectives on corporal modesty); textual criticism (Daniel J. Lasker surveys and assesses the history of a specific textual variation in Judah ha-Levi's Book of the Kuzari); codicological-textual history (Paul Saenger analyzes the relationship between chapter divisions of the Pentateuch in Christian -- especially Latin -- Bibles and those in Jewish tradition); Dead Sea Scrolls (Anthony J. Tomasino critically evaluates the formation and support data for the current consensus regarding the messianic nature of 4Q246; Michael O. Wise analyzes the content and dating of the manuscripts from Murabba'at and considers their contribution to our knowledge of various personalities both living during and involved in the First and Second Jewish Revolts); and historiography (Isaac Kalimi assesses the historiographical method of the writer of the book of Chronicles in light of both inner-canonical and extra-biblical considerations). Also included is a comprehensive bibliography of the honoree's works as well as discrete indexes of manuscripts, biblical references, classical and medieval works, and general items.

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Bir Umm Fawakhir is a fifth-sixth century AD Coptic/Byzantine gold-mining town located in the central Eastern Desert of Egypt. The Bir Umm Fawakhir Project of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago carried out four seasons of archaeological survey at the site, in 1992, 1993, 1996, and 1997; one season of excavation in 1999; and one study season in 2001. This volume is the final report on the 1996 and 1997 seasons. The goals of the 1996 and 1997 field seasons were to complete the detailed map of the main settlement, to continue the investigation of the outlying clusters of ruins or "Outliers" and to address some specific questions such as the ancient gold-extraction process. The completion of these goals makes the main settlement at Bir Umm Fawakhir one of the only completely mapped towns of the period in Egypt. Not only is the main settlement plotted room for room and door for door but also features such as guardposts, cemeteries, paths, roads, wells, outlying clusters of ruins and mines are known and some of these are features not always readily detectable archaeologically. This volume presents the pre-Coptic material; a detailed discussion of the remains in the main settlement, outliers and cemeteries; the Coptic/Byzantine pottery, small finds and dipinti; as well as a study of ancient mining techniques.

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This catalogue for an exhibit at Chicago's Oriental Institute Museum presents the newest research on the Predynastic and Early Dynastic Periods in a lavishly illustrated format. Essays on the rise of the state, contact with the Levant and Nubia, crafts, writing, iconography and evidence from Abydos, Tell el-Farkha, Hierakonpolis and the Delta were contributed by leading scholars in the field. The catalogue features 129 Predynastic and Early Dynastic objects, most from the Oriental Institute's collection, that illustrate the environmental setting, Predynastic and Early Dynastic culture, religion and the royal burials at Abydos. This volume will be a standard reference and a staple for classroom use.

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Tell Hamoukar is one of the largest Bronze Age sites in northern Mesopotamia. The present volume presents the results of three seasons of field survey and remote-sensing analysis at the site and its region. These studies were undertaken to address questions of urban origins, land use and demographic trends through time. Site descriptions and settlement histories are presented for Hamoukar and 59 other sites in its immediate hinterland over the last 8,000 years. The project paid close attention to the "off-site" landscape between sites and considered aspects of agricultural practices, land tenure and patterns of movement. For each phase of occupation, the patterns of settlement and land use are contextualised within larger patterns of Mesopotamian history, with particular attention to the proto-urban fifth millennium BC, the Uruk Expansion of the fourth millennium BC, the height of urbanism in the late third millennium, the impact of the Assyrian empire in the early first millennium BC and the Abbasid landscape of the late first millennium AD. The volume also includes a description of the unparalleled landscape of tracks in the Upper Khabur basin of Hassake province, northeastern Syria. Through analysis of CORONA satellite photographs, over 6,000 kilometres of pre-modern trackways were identified and mapped, mostly dating to the late third millennium and early Islamic periods. This area of northern Mesopotamia is thus one of the best-preserved ancient landscapes of movement in the world. The volume's appendices describe the 60 sites, their surface assemblages and the survey's ceramic typology.

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Originally coined to signify a style of pottery in southern Iraq, and by extension an associated people and a chronological period, the term "Ubaid" is now often used loosely to denote a vast Near Eastern interaction zone, characterized by similarities in material culture, particularly ceramic styles, which existed during the sixth and fifth millennia B.C. This zone extended over 2,000 km from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Straits of Hormuz, including parts of Anatolia and perhaps even the Caucasus. The volume contains twenty-three papers that explore what the "Ubaid" is, how it is identified, and how the Ubaid in one location compares to another in a distant location. The papers are the result of "The Ubaid Expansion? Cultural Meaning, Identity and the Lead-up to Urbanism," an International Workshop held at Grey College, University of Durham, 20-22 April 2006.

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An expedition from the University of Chicago excavated the site of Bismaya (ancient Adab) from December 24, 1903, until late June 1905. The excavations were directed first by Edgar J. Banks and then, briefly, by Victor S. Persons. Over 1,000 artifacts, many of them early cuneiform documents, were sent to Chicago, where they are now housed in the Oriental Institute Museum The results of the Bismaya excavations were never properly published, and most of the material was never published at all. Banks wrote a lively and highly readable popular account, Bismya, or the Lost City of Adab, that appeared in 1912 and gave the impression that his field methods were considerably less than satisfactory. However, that was not the case. Banks kept a careful field diary, complete with highly accurate sketches, and sent detailed weekly reports, lavishly illustrated with his own drawings, back to Chicago. These materials show that he excavated a mid-third millennium B.C. temple and discovered some of the world' s first historical inscriptions incised on stone vessels dedicated in that structure. He also uncovered residences of the late Early Dynastic period, two Akkadian administrative centers, and a palace of the Isin-Larsa/Old Babylonian period. This monograph presents this large and significant corpus of unpublished material and includes analyses of stratigraphy, architecture, sculpture, cylinder seals, metalwork, and pottery, and discussions of chronology, the succession of the first kings of Adab, and administrative practices during the third millennium B.C.

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With an introduction by Professor McGuire Gibson, this up-to-date account describes the state of the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad and chronicles the damage done to archaeological sites by illicit digging. Contributors include Donny George, John M. Russell, Katharyn Hanson, Clemens Reichel, Elizabeth C. Stone, and Patty Gerstenblith. Published in conjunction with the exhibit of the same name opening at the Oriental Institute April 10, 2008, this book commemorates the fifth anniversary of the looting of the Iraq National Museum.

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Until recently, the South Caucasus was a virtual /terra/ /incognita/ on Western archaeological maps of southwest Asia. The conspicuous absence of marked places, of site names, toponyms, and topography gave the impression of a region distant, unknown, and vacant. The Joint American-Armenian Project for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies (Project ArAGATS) was founded in 1998 to explore this terrain. Our investigations were guided by two overarching goals: to illuminate the social and political transformations central to the regions unique (pre)history and to explore the broader intellectual implications of collaboration between the rich archaeological traditions of Armenia (former U.S.S.R.) and the United States. This volume provides the first encompassing report on the ongoing studies of Project ArAGATS, detailing the general context of contemporary archaeological research in the South Caucasus as well as the specific context of our regional investigations in the Tsaghkahovit Plain of central Armenia. The book opens with detailed examinations of the history of archaeology in the South Caucasus, the theoretical problems that currently orient archaeological research, and a comprehensive reevaluation of the material bases for regional chronology and periodization. The work then provides the complete results of our regional investigations in the Tsaghkahovit Plain, including the findings of the first systematic pedestrian survey ever conducted in the Caucasus. Thanks to the results presented in this volume, and Project ArAGATSs ongoing excavations in the area, the Tsaghkahovit Plain is today the best known archaeological region in the South Caucasus. The present volume thus provides archaeologists with both an orientation to the prehistory of the South Caucasus and the complete findings of the first phase of Project ArAGATSs field investigations.

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This companion volume and catalog to the exhibit that opens on February 9, 2009, traces the life of Meresamun, whose mummy, dating to about 800 B.C., is one of the highlights of The Oriental Institute museum in Chicago, IL. The text introduces the historical and cultural setting of Egypt during her time. Essays and artifacts examine the role of music and of musicians in Egyptian temple cults, their training, and the types of musical instruments that Meresamun would have used. The life of Meresamun outside the temple is explored, with emphasis upon her social and legal status, what other professions were available to her, and what home life was like. The study of the life of this individual is augmented by forensic evidence obtained with the newest generation of CT scanners that sheds life on Meresamun's life and death.

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This volume represents a collection of contributions presented during the Third Annual University of Chicago Oriental Institute Seminar Religion and Power: Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond, held at the Oriental Institute, February 23-24, 2007. The purpose of this conference was to examine more closely concepts of kingship in various regions of the world and in different time periods. The study of kingship goes back to the roots of fields such as anthropology and religious studies, as well as Assyriology and Near Eastern archaeology. More recently, several conferences have been held on kingship, drawing on cross-cultural comparisons. Yet the question of the divinity of the king as god has never before been examined within the framework of a cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary conference. Some of the recent anthropological literature on kingship relegates this question of kings who deified themselves to the background or voices serious misgivings about the usefulness of the distinction between divine and sacred kings. Several contributors to this volume have pointed out the Western, Judeo-Christian background of our categories of the human and the divine. However, rather than abandoning the term divine kingship because of its loaded history it is more productive to examine the concept of divine kingship more closely from a new perspective in order to modify our understanding of this term and the phenomena associated with it.

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The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary was conceived to provide more than lexical information alone, more than a one-to-one equivalent between Akkadian and English words. By presenting each word in a meaningful context, often with a full and idiomatic translation, it recreates the cultural milieu and in many ways assumes the function of an encyclopedia.

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This volume addresses the topical interest in Islam, studying the process of its spread throughout the medieval world and the process of conversion to this religion and adoption of its cultural life. The evidence is presented in a series of essay reports on archaeological approaches in current Islamic Archaeology. These papers are the result of a seminar that attempted a comparative analysis of widely different regions and periods, based on archaeological monuments or artefacts, exploring processes of adaptation or adjustment to local cultural complexes. Islam may be seen as a religion, political system, and cultural complex, a trinity of inseparable aspects. The introduction of these variable characteristics of Islam, during initial contact and afterwards, resulted in changes in identity approached as a sort of "cognitive" archaeology. In each specific case, the author assesses the nature of the pre-Islamic regional tradition, the resulting plurality of cultures as a "multi-cultural" society, and finally a resultant normative condition as a regional or cosmopolitan culture. This exposure to unfamiliar subjects and archaeological perspectives offers a potential for more abstract, comparative modelling in future historical research.

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This catalogue is intended to be only a checklist of the Brooklyn Museum's collection of 212 Demotic Egyptian texts. The catalogue provides both the Museum and Demoticists generally with a list of all the pieces plus only such information as would make the list useful. It is not intended to be a complete publication of the texts with the usual full transliteration, translation, notes, and photographs or drawings. Rather, samples of each type of text (papyri, ostraca, inscribed stone and wooden pieces) are illustrated on the plates and only the more interesting passages in the texts are given in transliteration and translation. The book concludes with key word, name, title, and geographical name indices.

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A sequel to the author's Cuneiform Texts from the Ur III Period in the Oriental Institute, Volume 1: Drehem Administrative Documents from the Reign of Aulgi (OIP 115), this volume is the main publication of the 605 cuneiform tablets in the Asiatic Collection of the Oriental Institute Museum that were found at the site of the ancient administrative center Puzria-Dagan (Drehem) and date to the reign of Amar-Suena (2046-2038 b.c.), the third ruler of the Third Dynasty of Ur (2112-2004 b.c.). Presented in an arrangement based on both date and contents, these administrative documents are indispensable primary sources for socio-economic, political and religious history during the reign of Amar-Suena. The volume has an annotated typology of Drehem administrative records from the reign of Amar-Suena, detailed philological commentaries on individual texts and text groups, transliterations of all documents, a complete glossary, extensive analytical charts, as well as illustrations (hand copies and photographs) of selected cuneiform tablets. The sealing practice as attested on the sealed objects within this corpus is analyzed in an appendix by Clemens D Reichel.

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This volume presents the results of three seasons of excavations at Chogha Bonut, Lowland Susiana, in the modern-day province of Khuzestan, southwestern Iran. Susiana was a major contributor to the cultural development of the ancient Near East, and thanks to more than a century of archaeological investigation, it is also the best known region in the entire area. Excavations at numerous sites, but primarily at Susa and Chogha Mish in Susiana, have provided a long sequence of archaeological phases that span some 8,000 years, from early prehistoric times to the early Islamic period. The initial phases of the colonization of Susiana by early farmers, however, remained unknown until a series of excavations at Chogha Bonut pushed the earliest period of occupation of Susiana to the aceramic phase, ca. 7200 BC. The results of these excavations add to the already rich picture of cultural development in the region, the initial chapter of human adaptation in the early phases of village life in the Near East.

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