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

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.

Read more less

A collection of synthetic articles covering the field of Sumerology, including: Nissen on the geography of Sumer, Tom B Jones on the administrative archives, Edzard on the Sumerian oath, Diakonoff on writing, Civil on lexicography, and Sjoberg, Hallo, and Wilcke on different aspects of the Sumerian literary corpus.

Read more less

Explore the changing world of late nineteenth-century Iran through the gaze of one of its most renowned photographers, Antoin Sevruguin. This volume publishes for the first time the Oriental Institute Museum’s complete collection of nineteenth-century Iranian photographs, most of which were created by Sevruguin. The artfully staged photographs still resonate with us today. Accompanying the catalogue of photographs is a series of essays that investigating Sevruguin’s life and photographic career, including the lasting impact of his unique vision as demonstrated by the work of contemporary artist Yassaman Ameri.

Read more less

The Archive of Thotsutmis, Son of Panouphis presents for the first time one of the largest collections of Demotic ostraca to have been discovered intact by archaeologists in the twentieth century. They were excavated at the site of Deir el-Bahari, on the west bank of the Nile, opposite the city of Luxor, Egypt. Rarely have such deposits been found in situ. Excavated by Ambrose Lansing on behalf of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1915-16, the integrity and context of this find are critical to the proper understanding of the texts it contained. Through the publication and analysis of this archive of Demotic and Greek texts recorded on ostraca, the authors reconstruct the microhistory of Thotsutmis, son of Panouphis, and his family, who worked in Egypt on the west bank of Thebes as priests in the mortuary industry during the early Ptolemaic Period in the third century BC. The forty-two ostraca published in this volume provide a rare opportunity to explore the intersections between an intact ancient archive of private administrative documents and the larger social and legal contexts into which they fit. What the reconstructed microhistory reveals is an ancient family striving to make it among the wealthy and connected social network of Theban choachytes and pastophoroi, while they simultaneously navigated the bureaucratic maze of taxes, fees, receipts and legal procedures of the Ptolemaic state.

Read more less

This study of a thirteenth-century dwelling on Egypt's Red Sea Coast draws on multiple lines of evidence--including texts excavated at the site--to reconstruct a history of the structure and the people who dwelt within. The inhabitants participated in Nile Valley-Red Sea-Indian Ocean trade, transported Ḥāǧǧ pilgrims, sent grain to Mecca and Medina, and wrote sermons and amulets for the local faithful. These activities are detailed in the documents and fleshed out in the botanical, faunal, artifact, and stratigraphic evidence from the University of Chicago's excavations (1978-82). This compound eventually consisted of two houses and a row of storerooms and became the centre of mercantile activity at Quseir al-Qadim. Over time, as the number of named individuals who received shipping notes addressed to the "warehouse of Abū Mufarij" increased, living rooms and storerooms were added to accommodate this expansion of commerce. While most merchants were dealing in textiles, dates, and grains, additional commodities traded included perfumes, gemstone-decorated textiles, resist-dyed textiles, and porcelains. Specialist studies by Steven Goodman on the avian faunal remains and Wilma Wetterstrom on the macrobotanical finds reveal that the compound's occupants enjoyed a diet of chicken and Nile Valley produce such as grapes and watermelon, and they were supplemented by high-priced imports: nuts and fruits from around the Mediterranean, along with medicinal plants from as far away as India, indicate the wealth and status of this family of merchants. The evidence from this small portion of Quseir al-Qadim yields a rich local story that is a microcosm of Nile Valley-Red Sea-Indian Ocean trade under the last Ayyubid sultans of Egypt.

Read more less

The best-known sites along the length of the Nile River's Second Cataract are the ruins of Egyptian towns and fortresses occupied during the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms. One of the fortresses in the Second Cataract region, Dorginarti existed in a later era than the better-known Middle and New Kingdom forts. The earliest ceramics found at the site date from the later tenth or early ninth century BC, and those from a later occupation stem from the early eighth century. The latest phase of occupation did not extend far beyond the first phase of Persian dominance in Egypt beginning in the last quarter of the sixth century BC. This volume is the final report of the emergency excavations undertaken at Dorginarti for five months in 1964 by the University of Chicago's Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures as part of the UNESCO Nubian salvage project necessitated by the building of the Aswan High Dam. Following a description of the fortress's landscape and resources, the book describes Dorginarti's architecture in detail and then presents the selection of artifacts brought back from the Sudan and stored in the ISAC Museum. The picture that emerges from the archaeological record shows the continuing importance of Lower Nubia after the withdrawal of Egyptian control in the late second millennium BC and before the rise of the Kushite empire in the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty.

Read more less

Embroidering Identities: A Century of Palestinian Clothing is the companion piece to the exhibit held at the Oriental Institute from November 11, 2006 to March 25, 2007. It is an overview of the colourful and distinctive clothing of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Palestine. The richly illustrated text discusses the construction of traditional dresses, the materials and dyes employed, and clothing and embroidery in the years following 1948. Garments from many regions are illustrated and described. The volume includes a glossary of Arabic terms and a checklist to the exhibit.

Read more less

With the appearance of this volume, the Oriental Institute marks the true completion of the Egyptian Coffin Texts Project , an international cooperative program begun by James Henry Breasted and Alan H. Gardiner in 1922 and edited by Adriaan de Buck from 1935 until his death in 1959. When published in 1961, Volume 7, de Buck's final volume, was announced as "the last volume of the autographed Coffin Texts in the contemplated Project" (p. vii), although the Oriental Institute had never produced the autographed edition of Pyramid Texts within the Coffin Text corpus that had been explicitly promised in the introduction to Volume 1. Assumed to comprise a "distinct" and "foreign body" within the Coffin Texts, these long-lived spells were "reserved for later" (p. xi). After a lapse of forty years, a formally renewed Coffin Texts Project was authorised by the Director of the Oriental Institute in 2001, with the goal of completing the Oriental Institute's outstanding commitments. The translation volume once envisioned and entrusted to Tjalling Bruinsma had been rendered unnecessary by the publications of Robert O. Faulkner in 1969 ( Pyramid Texts ) and 1973-1978 ( Coffin Texts ), which serve to engage scholars and laymen alike. Glossaries, bibliographies, symposia, and detailed textual studies appeared, but the critical edition of Middle Kingdom Pyramid Texts remained unaccomplished. By careful examination of the Oriental Institute's original collation sheets and unpublished sources from Lisht, James P. Allen, after years of concentrated study, has now fulfilled the task admirably. It is hoped that the new edition stimulates discussion not only of the longevity of the Pyramid Texts, but of the nature of the Coffin Texts themselves. While Breasted insisted that the Pyramid Texts were "sharply distinguished" from the Coffin Texts, the frequent appearance of "Pyramid Texts" on coffins (among the narrowly defined "Coffin Texts") leaves this opinion open to question. Ironically, the one coffin acquired in Chicago by Breasted for study by the Coffin Texts Project (OIM 12072) contained only "Pyramid Texts" and was therefore excluded from the initial seven volumes. Now at last these Middle Kingdom texts on a coffin can be examined among the "Coffin Texts" (Robert K. Ritner, Director, The Egyptian Coffin Texts Project, 2001-05).

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

This volume is the final report on the first and second century a.d. and thirteenth and fourteenth century Islamic glass excavated at Quseir al-Qadim on the Red Sea coast of Egypt. The report not only describes the glass finds but also studies their distribution from the Red Sea to Arabia, East Africa, and India and raises some specific questions about the export of glassmaking technology and about the character of long-range trade in glass in both periods.

Read more less

This book is made up of twelve articles, sometimes brilliant but always interesting, contributed in honour of the seventieth birthday of John A. Wilson by his students and colleagues of the Oriental Institute. Contents: Zur Übersetzung der Präpositionen und Konjunktionen m und dr. ( R. Anthes ); Illusionism in Egyptian Architecture. ( A. Badaway ); A Ritual Ball Game? ( C. E. DeVries ); Foreign Gods in Ancient Egypt. ( S. H. Horn ); The Cruel Father: A Demotic Papyrus in the Library of G. Michaelides. ( G. R. Hughes ); Eunuchs in Ancient Egypt? ( G. E. Kadish ); Three Philological Notes. ( M. Lichtheim ); Thutmosis III's Benefactions to Amon. ( C. F. Nims ); Once Again the Coregency of Thutmose III and Amenhotep II. ( R. A. Parker ); Hathor at the Jubilee. ( E. F. Wente ); Some Egyptianisms in the Old Testament. ( R. J. Williams ); A Greco-Egyptian Funerary Stela. ( L. V. Zabkar ); Bibliography of John A. Wilson. ( E. B. Hauser ).

Read more less

In this volume the Nippur Expedition publishes the first results of its new program of research at Nippur, the holy city of Mesopotamia. This program, bringing together an interdisciplinary team to work on a historical site in Mesopotamia, focuses on the entire city, not just the sacred aspects. Concentrating on the West Mound, the first season yielded a sequence of temples in Area WA and a Kassite administrative palace above an Old Babylonian house in Area WB.

Read more less

An imposing array of scholars have united to pay a debt of piety to the late C. W. McEwan, whose untimely death in 1950 forestalled the publication of his campaign at Tell Fakhariyah, which took place in 1940. That the important results obtained by McEwan have thus been rescued is greatly to the credit of the editor and director of the Oriental Institute, Carl H. Kraeling, and the architect R. C. Haines, who prepared for publication the highly competent but necessarily incomplete topographic and architectural data assembled in the field by the late Harold D. Hill.

Read more less

This volume publishes the proceedings of the Theban Symposium that took place in May 2010, in Granada, Spain, at the Institute for Arabic Studies of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), on the general theme of "Creativity and Innovation in the Reign of Hatshepsut." The volume contains nineteen papers that present new perspectives on the reign of Hatshepsut and the early New Kingdom. The authors address a range of topics, including the phenomenon of innovation, the Egyptian worldview, politics, state administration, women's issues and the use of gender, cult and rituals, mortuary practices, and architecture. Groundbreaking for the study of Hatshepsut's reign and the beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty, this volume will become an important reference for scholars and lay readers interested in the history, culture, and archaeology of the time of Hatshepsut and the early New Kingdom.

Read more less

Our Work: Modern Jobs - Ancient Origins is the catalog for a photo-based exhibit that reveals that many modern professions originated in the ancient Middle East. Artifacts from the Oriental Institute Museum were paired with a baker, farmer, manicurist, brewer, poet, boat builder, judge and other professionals to show the antiquity of these jobs. The portraits are accompanied by commentary on the contributions of the ancient Middle East to life today and new insights into how members of the public view their relationship to the past. This volume will be of interest to educators, historians, and those interested in fine-arts photography.

Read more less

The seventh in the Oriental Institute Seminar Series, this volume contains papers that emerged from the seminar "Slaves and Households in the Near East" held at the Oriental Institute March 5-6, 2010. Despite widespread mention of enslaved people in historical records from the ancient, medieval and early modern Near East, scholars struggle to understand what defines this phenomenon in both particular contexts and in general. The purpose of the seminar was to seek new understandings of slavery through scholarly exchange and exploration of new approaches. In particular, contributors examined slavery in the context of households, an approach that allows scholars to expose different dimensions of the phenomenon beyond basic economic questions. Households, whether domestic units, temples or the building blocks of political organisations, can be used as the prism through which to view the dynamics among enslaved people and their immediate contacts. The volume contains micro-historical examinations of slavery in contexts spanning almost four millennia.

Read more less

On January 29, 2005, the Oriental Institute celebrated the official public opening of the Haas and Schwartz Megiddo Gallery. This occasion marked the return of some of the most extraordinary artifacts ever excavated in the southern Levant to permanent public display. The Oriental Institute's prolific history of exploration in the region is testament to a long-standing scholarly passion for discovery and the pursuit of knowledge. This volume draws from the momentum generated by the opening of the Megiddo Gallery and present a selection of highlights from the Institute's greater Israel collection.

Read more less

Selection of papers presented at the 51st meeting of the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale—International Congress of Assyriology & Near Eastern Archaeology.

Read more less

Robert D Biggs joined the staff of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (CAD) in 1963 after receiving his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. In June 2004, he celebrated his 70th birthday and retired from the University of Chicago as Professor of Assyriology in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations; his service to the CAD, however, will continue until the final volume appears. To acknowledge and honour his forty-one years of extraordinary service to the Assyrian Dictionary as collaborator, associate editor, and editorial board member, contributions from some of his former and current CAD colleagues are assembled into the volume. It is fitting to revive this series, as the first volume, From the Workshop of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary: Studies Presented to A Leo Oppenheim , appeared forty years ago, in June 1964, and Biggs's contribution there was his first published article.

Read more less

The results of the Amuq Valley Regional Projects (AVRP) presented in this volume are the outcome of eight seasons of intensive fieldwork (1995-2002) representing the first phase of a long-range, broadly-based archaeological investigation in the Hatay region of southern Turkey. From its inception the research was conceived as a series of coordinated field projects. The detailed and expansive scope of the regional project originated from a number of theoretical and methodological considerations. Encouraged in part by its potential for providing the examination of interactions between technological developments, complex social institutions, natural resources, and the environment, the original Oriental Institute project (then called the Syro-Hittite Expedition) in the 1930s was formally reactivated in 1995. The strategy of taking a regional approach with a series of linked field projects established an unusual multi-institutional laboratory to research key themes that it is hoped will provide explanations about regional and interregional relationships. The initial stage of the research strategy focused on contextualising the settlements by survey, followed by site-specific investigations prior to the resumption of new excavations. The regional surveys targeted the Amuq Valley (the plain of Antioch, today Antakya) and the delta of the Orontes River (today Samandag). Artifactual and micro-scale studies were the focus of the third scale of investigations.

Read more less

The studies in this impressive volume of over 700 pages are presented in memory of Douglas L. Esse, an archaeologist and assistant professor at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago until his untimely death at the age of forty-two on October 13, 1992. The majority of the thirty-four chapters in this volume are concerned with the study of the Early Bronze Age, and some chapters deal with periods and issues that pre-date and post-date the Early Bronze Age, as all of the forty-six authors selected to contribute to this volume were either colleagues or students of Esse and some were not primarily Early Bronze Age specialists. Chapter One includes three "Tributes" to Esse by L. E. Stager, A. Ben-Tor, and D. Saltz that assess the impact of Esse's scholarship, excellence in fieldwork, and the friendship he showed to all of those with whom he worked. Many of the chapters are concerned with ceramic studies from various historical periods, while other chapters deal with burial customs, cult, chronology, social organization, cylinder seal impressions, faunal studies, metrology, architecture, radiocarbon determinations, and maritime trade. The Israelite sites that figure prominently in these studies include Tel Maahaz, Tel Dor, Megiddo, Arad, Ai, Tel Yaqush, Nahal Tillah, Beit Yerah, Illin Tahtit, and Ashkelon. The geographical areas that are investigated include the Soreq Basin, the Akko Plain, the Jezreel Valley, the Dead Sea Plain, and the Carmel Coast and Ramat Menashe regions in Israel and Jordan; external studies are concerned with material from Egypt, the site of Alishar Höyuek in Turkey, Tell el-Umeiri in Jordan as well as with pottery connections in Arabia. One chapter is concerned with the latest historical periods, which discusses the Persian and Muslim conquests in Palestinian archaeology.

Read more less

Medinet Habu in western Thebes (modern Luxor, Egypt) is dominated by the great mortuary temples of King Ramesses III (ca. 1182 BC), and Kings Aye and Horemheb (ca. 1324-1293 BC). It served as the seat of the regional government in the Late New Kingdom, and an important Coptic Christian community grew up within its great fortification walls. For nearly 1,500 years Medinet Habu played a central role in Egyptian religion, life, and politics. In 1924, the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago began the documentation of Medinet Habu, but the last facet of the documentation - the publication of thousands of objects excavated at the site - was interrupted by World War II. This book, the first of a projected multiple volume series, marks the resurrection of the project to publish the small finds. It includes a catalogue of 349 scarabs, scaraboids (including lentoids, cowroids, and buttons), heart scarabs and their Sons of Horus amulets, heart amulets, seals, and seal impressions on bullae, vessel stoppers, amphora handles, mudbricks, and funerary cones that date from approximately 1470 BC to the eighth century AD. Each object is described and illustrated and, whenever possible, placed in its original archaeological context. These scarabs and scaraboids comprise one of the largest groups of such material excavated from any site in Egypt.

Read more less

The Oriental Institute continued its survey of Bir Umm Fawakhir, a site lying half way between the Nile and the Red Sea, with a short season in January 1993. Located close to the famous bekhen-stone quarries and graffiti of the Wadi Hammamat, the 1992 project took the form of a geological study of the area of Bir Umm Fawakhir. The presence of these mineral resources in this otherwise barren hyper-arid desert, explains why the Bir Umm Fawakhir town was established in this area. By far the most valuable resource was the gold carried in white quartz veins in the local granite, and the mountainsides around Bir Umm Fawakhir are riddled and trenched with ancient mines. This report reflects on the aims of the 1993 season which was to continue mapping the site, to expand the pottery corpus, to seek for some specific features not found in 1992 such as defensive structures and churches, and to carrry out a more general survey of the site's immediate vicinity.

Read more less

The papyri published here, chiefly in the collection of the Oriental Institute Museum, comprise part of a large family archive from the town of Hawara in the Egyptian Fayum. Written in Demotic and Greek, the documents (annuity contracts, donations, sales, mortgage agreements, loan repayments) are an excellent source of information about the Egypt of the fourth to third century b.c. Professor George R. Hughes had worked on the ten Oriental Institute Hawara papyri for a number of years, but sadly, it was not possible for him to finish the manuscript before his death in December 1992; he did, however, prepare preliminary transliterations and translations of the papyri, including the Rendell Papyrus published in the Appendix. Discussions, commentaries, and glossaries are included. Richard Jasnow completed the manuscript with the assistance of James Keenan, who prepared the Greek texts. The book is of interest to Egyptologists, Hellenists, and all of those concerned with the economic and social history of the Late period in Egypt.

Read more less

Traditionally, writing—a graphic, multidimensional form of communication—has been approached as a vehicle for representing, and therefore conveying, the spoken word. Moving beyond this manner of analysis, this volume interrogates writing as a medium that is not simply a handmaiden to oral and aural exchange but a communication system that is richly layered and experienced. To exploit this aspect of visual code, scholars from the fields of Egyptology, Sinology, Hittitology, and Assyriology, together with Mesoamericanists, art historians, and a sign language specialist, are brought together in this volume. In its pages, these contributors incorporate into their analyses methods more commonly used in linguistics and semiotics, communication studies, art historical analysis, and traditional philology to new ends to form original trajectories of inquiry. Each contribution either lays bare explicit exploitation of visuality in scribal production as a means to cementing power, reveal the mystical, induce humour or expose clandestine views, or locates implicit knowledge schemes and cultural maps underlying and informing these same productions. The pioneering investigations presented in Seen Not Heard reveal that although writing may be heard, the fact that it can also be seen affects its reception and therefore the meaning of any transported phonological units.

Read more less

From 1923 to 1933, the Chicago Field Museum and the University of Oxford conducted archaeological excavations at the site of Kish, located on the floodplain of the Euphrates River in modern Iraq approximately 80 kilometres south of Baghdad. Over the course of ten years of work, the expedition explored seventeen different mounds both inside and outside the ancient boundaries of Kish. The finds were divided at the end of each season, with the Iraq Museum retaining half of the objects and any one-of-a-kind items and the two excavating institutions splitting the remainder. Beginning in 2004, the Field Museum undertook a re-evaluation of its Kish holdings. To highlight new research and insights into the material culture from Kish and our understanding of the importance of the site to Mesopotamian archaeology, the Field Museum held a symposium in 2008 that brought together an international group of scholars who presented papers on various aspects of the ancient city. This volume, which grew out of that symposium, presents a wide array of studies on the excavated material remains from Kish, including cuneiform texts, animal figurines, human remains, lithics, figural stucco wall decorations, and more.

Read more less

This book presents a comprehensive corpus of beads and pendants found during excavations undertaken by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago between 1960 and 1968 at the Lower Nubian sites of Qustul, Adindan, Serra East, Dorginarti, Ballana and Kalabsha and stored in the Oriental Institute Museum. This vast, illustrated catalogue organises the finds first chronologically according to the main periods of Nubian history and then by cultural units, beginning with the A-Group and ending with modern times. The present volume—the first of two—comprises beads from Early Nubian (A-Group, Post-A-Group), Middle Nubian (C-Group, Pan Grave, Kerma, Middle Kingdom), and New Kingdom sites. The discussion of each cultural unit begins with background information and develops into a fascinating story of the most characteristic types that form part of that group's identity, though types and materials often cross chronological and regional borders. The story is also one of jewellery fashions and the wealth and long-distance contacts of Lower Nubia, which lay at the crossroads of ancient routes in this part of the world. More specialized information on bead types, ordered by the materials from which the beads were made, is given in the second section of each cultural category. An outline of the preserved beadwork and an anthropological analysis of the remains of the beads' owners, together with references to parallels known from relevant literature and museum research, are also provided. The book concludes with illustrated synoptic and concordance tables that allow the reader to switch easily between catalogue, Oriental Institute Museum, and Oriental Institute Nubian Expedition find numbers.

Read more less

The Damascus Palm Fragment investigates Arabic's transformative historical phase, the passage from the pre-Islamic to the Islamic period, through a new approach. It asks, What would Arabic's early history look like if we wrote it based on the documentary evidence? The book frames this question through the linguistic investigation of the Damascus Psalm Fragment (PF), the longest Arabic text composed in Greek letters from the early Islamic period. It is argued that its language is a witness to the Arabic vernacular of the early Islamic period, and then moves to understand its relationship with Arabic of the pre-Islamic period, the Qur'anic Consonantal Text, and the first Islamic century papyri, arguing that all of this material belongs to a dialectal complex that we call Old Higazi. The book concludes by presenting a scenario for the emergence of standard Classical Arabic as the literary language of the late eighth century and beyond. This is the second volume to appear in the new Oriental Institute series - Late Antique and Medieval Islamic Near East (LAMINE) - which aims to publish a variety of scholarly works, including monographs, edited volumes, critical text editions, translations, studies of corpora of documents, in short any work that offers a significant contribution to understanding the Near East between roughly 200 and 1000 CE.

Read more less

There are, perhaps, no more contentious issues within the study of Achaemenid Persia than those surrounding its religion(s) and religious iconography. Owing to the role that fire plays in Zoroastrian beliefs in later periods in Iran, almost any discussion of the subject of Achaemenid religion will eventually turn to the identification of sacred fire, fire temples, fire worship, and fire altars in the archaeological, epigraphic, and literary records. The focus of this book is a corpus of glyptic imagery preserved as impressions on two large archives of administrative tablets from Persepolis, the Persepolis Fortification archive (509-493 BC) and the Persepolis Treasury archive (492-457 BC). The glyptic imagery here published concerns representations of what have been traditionally termed "fire altars" and/or "fire temples." Most of this glyptic evidence has never been published; many of the structures and the scenes in which they occur are strikingly original. The goals of this study are to introduce a new corpus of visual imagery concerning religious ritual in the Achaemenid period and to explore the significance of this visual language for our understanding of ritual traditions emerging within the heart of the empire at its most critical formative period, the reign of Darius I. This study seeks also to use the Persepolitan glyptic evidence as a springboard to re-visit the most famous "fire altar" depicted in Achaemenid art, that on the tomb relief of Darius I at Naqs-e Rostam. This study is an initial step in the development of a religious topography for the zone encompassing Persepolis and Naqs-e Rostam, both a topography on the imaginary level (through images) and a topography on the physical level (through the built space). The glyptic images assembled in this study are the most numerous, the most visually complex, and the best dated and contextualized evidence that currently exists for the study of fire in ritual, and religious ritual more broadly, in early Achaemenid Iran.

Read more less

Janet H. Johnson, Morton D. Hull Distinguished Professor of Egyptology, is internationally known as editor of the Chicago Demotic Dictionary (CDD) project (1976–present), but her publications and interests extend far beyond lexicography. These range from philology and social history to technology and archaeology, including gender studies and marriage, bureaucracy and scribal training, Egyptian grammar of all periods, as well as computer applications to Egyptology and archaeological investigations of the late antique port at Quseir on the Red Sea coast and medieval Luxor. This Festschrift, by twenty-eight colleagues, students, and friends, reflects her wide variety of interests, with topics ranging from the Old Kingdom to Late Antiquity.

Read more less

The volume is the result of the Ninth Annual University of Chicago Oriental Institute PostDoc Seminar, held on March 16-17, 2013. Twenty scholars specialized in the Old and New World from all over Europe and the US came together to find new approaches in the study of households in complex societies. The papers in this volume present case studies from the Near East, Egypt and Nubia, the Classical World, and Mesoamerica, including three comparative responses from the perspective of the different disciplines. By combining the archaeology record, scientific data and written documents the papers examine and contextualize different approaches and techniques in uncovering household behavior from the material record and discuss their suitability for the respective region and site. Building on the methodological groundwork laid out in a number of recent publications on household archaeology the volume contributes to the methodological and theoretical discussion, expands on the topics of society, identity, and ethnicity in household studies and opens up new avenues of research such as the perception of space in this innovative field. At the same time the papers reveal problems and disparities with which household archaeology is still struggling. It is hoped that the variety of case studies presented in this volume will further inspire the interested reader to establish new research agendas and excavation strategies that contribute to the development of the field in the various regions covered in the different papers and beyond.

Read more less

This guide to over 100 highlights of the collections of the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago presents objects from ancient Mesopotamia, Syria-Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt, Persia, Nubia, and objects from the Islamic collection. It features all new photography, provenance information, and a brief description of each object, as well as a history of the collections and a concordance.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

Issued in conjunction with an exhibit at the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago, this is the first comprehensive study of birds in ancient Egyptian society, economy, art, and religion. Essays address the role of birds in the religious landscape, their use in hieroglyphic and Coptic scripts, birds as protective symbols, as decorative motifs, and as food. A group of essays on "Egyptian Birds and Modern Science" presents the newest forensic research on bird mummies. Other articles address bird behavior as shown in Egyptian art and the present state of avifauna in the Nile Valley. The catalog describes forty artifacts, many of which are previously unpublished. An index of bird species makes this volume useful for naturalists as well as for Egyptologists and art historians.

Read more less