Mesopotamian Dark Age Revisited Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of Mesopotamian Dark Age Revisited book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.
Mesopotamian Dark Age Revisited by Hermann Hunger,Regine Pruzsinszky Pdf
In 2002 an international conference organised by the SCIEM 2000 programme (Synchronization of the Civilisations in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 2nd Millennium BC) was held in Vienna.
In this modern era of global environmental crisis, Sing Chew provides a convincing analysis of a 5,000-year history of recurring human and environmental crises_a Dark Ages significant in defining the relationship between nature and culture. The author's message about the coming Dark Ages, as human communities continue to reorganize to meet the contingencies of ecological scarcity and climate changes, is a must-read for those concerned with human interactions and environmental changes, including environmental anthropologists and historians, world historians, geographers, archaeologists, and environmental scientists.
The First Dynasty of the Sealand in Mesopotamia by Odette Boivin Pdf
The Sealand kingdom arose from the rebellion against Babylonian hegemony in the latter half of the 18th century BCE., forcing it to share power over Sumer and Akkad. Although its kings maintained themselves throughout the turmoil leading to the demise of the Amorite dynasty at Babylon, it remains one of the most poorly documented Mesopotamian polities. Until recently, it was known to us mainly through its inclusion into later king lists and chronicles, but the recent publication of well over 400 archival texts from a Sealand palace, soon followed by literary and divinatory tablets, finally makes it possible to study this polity from primary sources. This book proposes a history of the Sealand kingdom based on the new evidence and a reevaluation of previously known sources. The aspects examined are: the economy — mainly the palatial administration and transformation of agricultural and animal resources; the panthea and the palace-sponsored cult, which show that Sealand I kings may have positioned their rule in a Larsean tradition; the political history, including a discussion of the geography and the relative chronology; the recording and transmission of knowledge on the Sealand I dynasty in Mesopotamian historiography.
Constituent, Confederate, and Conquered Space by Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum,Nicole Brisch,Jesper Eidem Pdf
The Mittani empire is one of the most enigmatic political structures in Mesopotamian history. Reconstructing the emergence and the organisation of this state, whose territory encompassed Upper Mesopotamia touching the Levant and the piedmont plains of the Zagros in the East at the height of its power, is exceedingly difficult. Cuneiform specialists, archeologists and historians discuss the Mittani state with regard to modes of spatial organisation co- and preexisting in the region.
Bodies of Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia by Matthew Rutz Pdf
In Bodies of Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia Matthew Rutz explores the relationship between ancient collections of texts, commonly deemed libraries and archives, and the modern interpretation of titles like ‘diviner’. By looking at cuneiform tablets as artifacts with archaeological contexts, this work probes the modern analytical categories used to study ancient diviners and investigates the transmission of Babylonian/Assyrian scholarship in Syria. During the Late Bronze Age diviners acted as high-ranking scribes and cultic functionaries in Emar, a town on the Syrian Euphrates (ca. 1375-1175 BCE). This book’s centerpiece is an extensive analytical catalogue of the excavated tablet collection of one family of diviners. Over seventy-five fragments are identified for the first time, along with many proposed joins between fragments.
Historical Dictionary of Mesopotamia by Gwendolyn Leick Pdf
The Greek name Mesopotamia means 'land between the rivers.' The Romans used this term for an area that they controlled only briefly (between 115 and 117 A.D.): the land between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, from the south Anatolian mountains ranges to the Persian Gulf. It comprises the civilizations of Sumer and Akkad (third millennium B.C.) as well as the later Babylonian and Assyrian empires of the second and first millennium. Although the 'history' of Mesopotamia in the strict sense of the term only begins with the inscriptions of Sumerian rulers around the 27th century B.C., the foundations for Mesopotamian civilization, especially the beginnings of irrigation and the emergence of large permanent settlements, were laid much earlier, in the fifth and fourth millennium. The second edition of the Historical Dictionary of Mesopotamia defines concepts, customs, and notions peculiar to the civilization of ancient Mesopotamia, from adult adoption to ziggurats. This is accomplished through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, appendixes, and hundreds of cross-reference dictionary entries on religion, economy, society, geography, and important kings and rulers.
Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia by J. Nicholas Reid Pdf
Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia explores the earliest historical evidence related to imprisonment in the history of the world. While many historical investigations into prisons have revolved around the important question of punishment, this work moves beyond that more narrow approach to consider the multifunctional practices of detaining the body in ancient Iraq. It is the contention of this book that imprisonment arose out of the desire to control and detain the body in relation to labor. The practice of detainment for coercion became adaptable to a variety of circumstances and goals, which shaped the contexts and practices of imprisonment. With time, religious ideology was attached to imprisonment. In one literary text, a prisoner was refined like silver and given new birth in the prison. The misery of imprisonment gave rise to lament through which a criminal could be ritually purified and restored to a right relationship with their personal god. Beyond this literary perspective, this work reconstructs how imprisonment and religious ideology intersected with the judicial process and explores the evidence related to the reasons behind imprisonment, the treatment of prisoners, and the evidence related to the lengths of their stays.
Babylonia under the Sealand and Kassite Dynasties by Susanne Paulus,Tim Clayden Pdf
Babylonia in the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE is one of the most understudied periods of Mesopotamian history. In the last few years, discoveries of new texts and archaeological materials from the Sealand Dynasty have emerged, which expand the possibilities to fill this gap in our knowledge of Mesopotamian history. At the same time, scholars have started to revive Kassite studies using new materials, methods, and questions. While those works are groundbreaking contributions to the field, many questions about the history and chronology, archaeology, economy, language of Babylonia during this period are still unsolved. This volume brings together eleven contributions by leading scholars in the Sealand and Kassite period, approaching those questions from an archaeological, ethnological, historical, linguistic, and economical point of view. The book opens with an introduction into the history and research on Babylonia under the Sealand Dynasty and the Kassites.
Debt and Indebtedness at Emar by Maurizio Viano Pdf
This book is the first comprehensive study of debts and credit system at Emar. It focuses on the socio-economic aspects of credit access and indebtedness as well as on the motivations behind debts and debt settlement in the city of Emar. The credit system is analyzed through several factors: the purpose of debts, i.e., productive or consumptive; the procedures for granting loans; the strategies put in place to meet an obligation and to cope with economic difficulties; the consequences of non-fulfillment, which may lead to servitude or slavery; the different types of slavery; slave prices; the mechanisms of enslavement; and termination of slavery. Moneylending practices and the formation of servile conditions at Emar are studied in the context of the Syrian economy aiming to understand whether the Emar evidence conforms with a socio political and economic crisis that is generally acknowledged to have struck Syria, Anatolia and Northern Mesopotamia at the end of the Late Bronze Age. This work is of sure relevance for scholars interested in socio-economic history, not only of the pertinent historical-geographical area.
Political Change and Material Culture in Middle to Late Bronze Age Canaan by Shlomit Bechar Pdf
Do shifts in material culture instigate administrative change, or is it the shifting political winds that affect material culture? This is the central question that Shlomit Bechar addresses in this book, taking the transition from the Middle to Late Bronze Age (seventeenth–fourteenth centuries BCE) in northern Canaan as a test case. Combining archaeological and historical analysis, Bechar identifies the most significant changes evident in architectural and ceramic remains from this period and then explores how and why contemporary political shifts may have influenced, or been influenced by, these developments. Bechar persuasively argues that the Egyptian conquest of the southern Levant—enabled by local economic decline following the expulsion of the Hyksos and the fall of northern Syrian cities—was the impetus for these changes in ceramics and architecture. Using a macro-typological approach to examine the ceramic assemblages, she also discusses the impact of the influx of Aegean imports, suggesting that while “attached specialists” were primarily responsible for ceramic production in the Middle Bronze Age, Late Bronze Age ceramics were increasingly made by “independent specialists,” another important result of the new administrative system created following Thutmose III’s campaign. An important contribution to our understanding of the transition between the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, this original and insightful book will appeal to specialists in the Bronze Age Levant, especially those interested in using ceramic assemblages to examine social and political change.
Envisioning the Past Through Memories by Davide Nadali Pdf
Memory is a constructed system of references, in equilibrium, of feeling and rationality. Comparing ancient and contemporary mechanisms for the preservation of memories and the building of a common cultural, political and social memory, this volume aims to reveal the nature of memory, and explores the attitudes of ancient societies towards the creation of a memory to be handed down in words, pictures, and mental constructs. Since the multiple natures of memory involve every human activity, physical and intellectual, this volume promotes analyses and considerations about memory by focusing on various different cultural activities and productions of ancient Near Eastern societies, from artistic and visual documents to epigraphic evidence, and by considering archaeological data. The chapters of this volume analyse the value and function of memory within the ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian societies, combining archaeological, textual and iconographical evidence following a progression from the analysis of the creation and preservation of both single and multiple memories, to the material culture (things and objects) that shed light on the impact of memory on individuals and community.
The World of the Oxus Civilization by Bertille Lyonnet,Nadezhda A Dubova Pdf
This collection of essays presents a synthesis of current research on the Oxus Civilization, which rose and developed at the turn of the 3rd to 2nd millennia BC in Central Asia. First discovered in the 1970s, the Oxus Civilization, or the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), has engendered many different interpretations, which are explored in this volume by an international group of archaeologists and researchers. Contributors cover all aspects of this fascinating Bronze Age culture: architecture; material culture; grave goods; religion; migrations; and trade and interactions with neighboring civilizations, from Mesopotamia to the Indus, and the Gulf to the northern steppes. Chapters also examine the Oxus Civilization’s roots in previous local cultures, explore its environmental and chronological context, or the possibly coveted metal sources, and look into the reasons for its decline. The World of the Oxus Civilization offers a broad and fascinating examination of this society, and provides an invaluable updated resource for anyone working on the culture, history, and archaeology of this region and on the multiple interactions at work at that time in the ancient Near East.
A Companion to Assyria is a collection of original essays on ancient Assyria written by key international scholars. These new scholarly contributions have substantially reshaped contemporary understanding of society and life in this ancient civilization. The only detailed up-to-date introduction providing a scholarly overview of ancient Assyria in English within the last fifty years Original essays written and edited by a team of respected Assyriology scholars from around the world An in-depth exploration of Assyrian society and life, including the latest thought on cities, art, religion, literature, economy, and technology, and political and military history
The Material and Ideological Base of the Old Babylonian State by Lukáš Pecha Pdf
This book describes and analyzes the economic and administrative structure as well as the ideological background of the Old Babylonian state during the rule of the first dynasty. The author focuses on the role of the state in the economy, administration, politics, and ideology.
