In The Representations of Women in the Middle Kingdom Tombs of Officials Lubica Hudakova offers an in-depth analysis of female iconography in the decorative programme of Middle Kingdom non-royal tombs, highlighting changes and innovations in comparison to the Old Kingdom. Previously considered too uniform, the study represents the first systematic investigation of two-dimensional images of women and reveals their variability in space and time. Hudakova examines the roles appointed to women by analyzing how they are depicted in a variety of contexts. Taking into account their postures, gestures, garments, hairstyles, size of the body, age as well as attributes and tools used by them, along with the scene orientation, she traces diachronic and diatopic developments and regional traditions in the Middle Kingdom tomb decoration.

Advocates of the established hypotheses on the origins of the Synoptic gospels and their interrelationships (the Synoptic Problem), and especially those defending or contesting the existence of the "source" (Q), are increasingly being called upon to justify their position with reference to ancient media practices. Still others go so far as to claim that ancient media realities force a radical rethinking of the whole project of Synoptic source criticism, and they question whether traditional documentary approaches remain valid at all. This debate has been hampered to date by the patchy reception of research on ancient media in Synoptic scholarship. Seeking to rectify this problem, Alan Kirk here mounts a defense, grounded in the practices of memory and manuscript transmission in the Roman world, of the Two Document Hypothesis. He shows how ancient media/memory approaches in fact offer new leverage on classic research problems in scholarship on the Synoptic Gospels, and that they have the potential to break the current impasse in the Synoptic Problem. The results of his analysis open up new insights to the early reception and scribal transmission of the Jesus tradition and cast new light on some long-conflicted questions in Christian origins.

This volume is the product of an interdisciplinary conference held at the University of Texas at Austin. Specialists in the study of inscriptions, architecture, sculpture, coins, tombs, pottery, and texts collaborate to produce new portraits of religion and society in the ancient city of Corinth. The studies focus on groups like the early Roman colonists, the Augustales (priests of Augustus), or the Pauline house churches; on specific cults such as those of Asklepios, Demeter, or the Sacred Spring; on media (e.g., coins, or burial inscriptions); or on the monuments and populations of nearby Kenchreai or Isthmia. The result is a deeper understanding of the religious life of Corinth, contextualized within the socially stratified cultures of the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

The proceedings of the conference Egypt, Canaan and Israel: History, Imperialism, Ideology and Literature include the latest discussions about the political, military, cultural, economic, ideological, literary and administrative relations between Egypt, Canaan and Israel during the Second and First Millennia BC incorporating texts, art, and archaeology.

In Architecture and Asceticism Loosley Leeming presents the first interdisciplinary exploration of Late Antique Syrian-Georgian relations available in English. The author takes an inter-disciplinary approach and examines the question from archaeological, art historical, historical, literary and theological viewpoints to try and explore the relationship as thoroughly as possible. Taking the Georgian belief that 'Thirteen Syrian Fathers' introduced monasticism to the country in the sixth century as a starting point, this volume explores the evidence for trade, cultural and religious relations between Syria and the Kingdom of Kartli (what is now eastern Georgia) between the fourth and seventh centuries CE. It considers whether there is any evidence to support the medieval texts and tries to place this posited relationship within a wider regional context.

Peter Karavites presents a revisionist overview of Homeric scholarship, whose purpose is to bridge the gap between the "positivist" and "negativist" theories dominant in the greater part of the twentieth century. His investigation derives new insights from Homer's text and solves the age old question of the relationship between Homer and the Mycenaean age.

In Conflict, Commerce, and an Aesthetic of Appropriation in the Italian Maritime Cities, 1000-1150, Karen Rose Mathews analyzes the relationship between war, trade, and the use of spolia (appropriated objects from past and foreign cultures) as architectural decoration in the public monuments of the Italian maritime republics in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Excavations in Residential Areas of Tikal-Nonelite Groups Without Shrines is a two-volume presentation of the excavations carried out in and near small residential structures at Tikal, Guatemala, beginning in 1961. These reports show that Tikal was more than a ceremonial center; in addition to its numerous temples, the great Maya city was home to a large population of people. These volumes look at the residential structures themselves as well as domestic artifacts such as burials, ceramic test pits, chultuns. Tikal Report 20B is primarily analytical in nature, reviewing and interpreting the data from Report 20A to draw new conclusions about settlement, demography, and society at Tikal. Together, Tikal Reports 20A and 20B augment the data presented in Tikal Reports 19 and 21. University Museum Monograph, 140

World Prehistory and Archaeology provides an integrated discussion of world prehistory and archaeological methods, presenting an up-to-date perspective on what we know about our human prehistory and how we come to know it. A cornerstone of World Prehistory and Archaeology is the discussion of prehistory as an active process of discovery. Methodological issues are addressed throughout the text to engage readers. Archaeological methods are introduced, following which the question of how we know the past is discussed. This fifth edition involves readers in the current state of archaeological research, revealing how archaeologists work and interpret what they find. Through the coverage of various new research, author Michael Chazan shows that archaeology is truly a global discipline. In this edition there is a particular emphasis on the relevance of archaeology to contemporary society and to the major issues that face us today. This edition will provide students with a necessary grounding in the fundamentals of archaeology, before engaging them with the work that goes into understanding world prehistory. They will be given the tools to place this knowledge in the context of the modern world, acknowledging the relevance of archaeology to the concerns of today.

In An Arena for Higher Powers Olof Sundqvist investigates ceremonial buildings and religious ruler strategies in Late Iron Age Scandinavia (i.e. AD 550-1050/1100). The author offers here an account of the role played by religion in political undertakings among the pre-Christian ruling elites at halls and cultic buildings. Sundqvist applies a regional approach, so as to be able to account for the specific historical, cultural and social contexts. The focus is mainly on three regions, the Lake Malaren area in Sweden, Trondelag in Norway, and Iceland. Since the political structure and other contextual aspects partly differed in the three regions, the religious strategies for gaining legitimacy and authorization at the sanctuaries also varied to some extent in these areas.

Ancient Civilizations offers a comprehensive and straightforward account of the world's first civilizations and how they were discovered, drawing on many avenues of inquiry including archaeological excavations, surveys, laboratory work, highly specialized scientific investigations, and both historical and ethnohistorical records. This book covers the earliest civilizations in Eurasia and the Americas, from Egypt and the Sumerians to the Indus Valley, Shang China, and the Maya. It also addresses subsequent developments in Southwest Asia, moving on to the first Aegean civilizations, Greece and Rome, the first states of sub-Saharan Africa, divine kings and empires in East and Southeast Asia, and the Aztec and Inka empires of Mesoamerica and the Andes. It includes a number of features to support student learning: a wealth of images, including several new illustrations; feature boxes which expand on key sites, finds, and written sources; and an extensive guide to further reading. With new perceptions of the origin and collapse of states, including a review of the issue of sustainability, this fifth edition has been extensively updated in the light of spectacular new discoveries and the latest theoretical advances. Examining the world's pre-industrial civilizations from a multidisciplinary perspective and offering a comparative analysis of the field which explores the connections between all civilizations around the world, this volume provides a unique introduction to pre-industrial civilizations in all their brilliant diversity. It will prove invaluable to students of Archaeology.

Pilgrimage to ritually significant places is a part of daily life in the Maya world. These journeys involve important social and practical concerns, such as the maintenance of food sources and world order. Frequent pilgrimages to ceremonial hills to pay offerings to spiritual forces for good harvests, for instance, are just as necessary for farming as planting fields. Why has Maya pilgrimage to ritual landscapes prevailed from the distant past and why are journeys to ritual landscapes important in Maya religion? How can archaeologists recognize Maya pilgrimage, and how does it compare to similar behavior at ritual landscapes around the world? The author addresses these questions and others through cross-cultural comparisons, archaeological data, and ethnographic insights.

Food and feasting are key themes in the Hebrew Bible and the culture it represents. The contributors to this handbook draw on a multitude of disciplines to offer an overview of food in the Hebrew Bible and ancient Israel. Archaeological materials from biblical lands, along with the recent interest in ethnographic data, a new focus in anthropology, and emerging technologies provide valuable information about ancient foodways. The contributors examine not only the textual materials of the Hebrew Bible and related epigraphic works, but also engage in a wider archaeological, environmental, and historical understanding of ancient Israel as it pertains to food. Divided into five parts, this handbook examines and considers environmental and socio-economic issues such as climate and trade, the production of raw materials, and the technology of harvesting and food processing. The cultural role of food and meals in festivals, holidays, and biblical regulations is also discussed, as is the way food and drink are treated in biblical texts, in related epigraphic materials, and in iconography.

The Iguvine Tables (Tabulae Iguvinae) are among the most invaluable documents of Italic linguistics and religion. Seven bronze tablets discovered in 1444 in the Umbrian town of Gubbio (ancient Iguvium), they record the rites and sacral laws of a priestly brotherhood, the Fratres Atiedii, with a degree of detail unparalleled elsewhere in ancient Italy. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that combines philological and linguistic, as well as ritual analysis, Michael Weiss not only addresses the many interpretive cruces that have puzzled scholars for a century and a half, but also constructs a coherent theory of the entire ritual performance described on Tables III and IV. In addition, Weiss sheds light on many questions of Roman ritual practice and places the Iguvine Tables in their broader Italic and Indo-European contexts.

Knossos is one of the most important sites in the ancient Mediterranean. It remained amongst the largest settlements on the island of Crete from the Neolithic until the late Roman times, but aside from its size it held a place of particular significance in the mythological imagination of Greece and Rome as the seat of King Minos, the location of the Labyrinth and the home of the Minotaur. Sir Arthur Evans’ discovery of ‘the Palace of Minos’ has indelibly associated Knossos in the modern mind with the ‘lost’ civilisation of Bronze Age Crete. The allure of this ‘lost civilisation’, together with the considerable achievements of ‘Minoan’ artists and craftspeople, remain a major attraction both to scholars and to others outside the academic world as a bastion of a romantic approach to the past. In this volume, James Whitley provides an up-to-date guide to the site and its function from the Neolithic until the present day. This study includes a re-appraisal Bronze Age palatial society, as well as an exploration of the history of Knossos in the archaeological imagination. In doing so he takes a critical look at the guiding assumptions of Evans and others, reconstructing how and why the received view of this ancient settlement has evolved from the Iron Age up to the modern era.

The volume The Politics of Honour in the Greek Cities of the Roman Empire, co-edited by Anna Heller and Onno van Nijf, studies the public honours that Greek cities bestowed upon their own citizens and foreign dignitaries and benefactors. These included civic praise, crowns, proedria, public funerals, honorific statues and monuments. The authors discuss the development of this honorific system, and in particular the epigraphic texts and the monuments through which it is accessible. The focus is on the Imperial period (1st-3rd centuries AD). The papers investigate the forms of honour, the procedures and formulae of local practices, as well as the changes in local honorific habits that resulted from the integration of the Greek cities in the Roman Empire.

The ancient Mesoptamian city of Ur was a Sumerian city state which flourished as a centre of trade and civilisation between 2025-1738 BCE. However, in the recent past it suffered from the disastrous Gulf war and from neglect. It still remains a potent symbol for people of all faiths and will have an important role to play in the future This account of Ur's past looks at both the ancient city and its evolution over centuries, and its archaeological interpretation in more recent times. From the nineteenth century explorers and their identification of the site of Mukayyar as the Biblical city of Ur, the study proceeds to look in detail at the archaeologist Leonard Woolley and his key discoveries during the 1920s and 30s. Using the findings as a framework and utilising the latest evidence from environmental, historical and archaeological studies, the volume explores the site's past in chronological order from the Ubaid period in the 5th millennium to the death of Alexander. It looks in detail at the architectural remains: the sacred buildings, royal graves and also the private housing which provides a unique record of life four thousand years ago.The volume also describes the part played by Ur in the Gulf war and discusses the problems raised for archaeologists in the war's aftermath.

The diffusion of the cults of Isis is recently again intensively studied. Research on this fascinating phenomenon has traditionally been characterised by its focus on L' gypte hors d' gypte, while developments in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt itself were often seen as belonging to a different domain. This volume tries to overcome that unhealthy dichotomy by studying the cults of Isis in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt itself in relation to developments in the Mediterranean at large. The book not only presents an overview of the most important deities, often based on new or unpublished material, but also pays ample attention to the cultural processes behind Isis on Nile, like relations between style and identity, religious choice, social- and cultural memory and Egypt s view of its own past.

Southeast Asia ranks among the most significant regions in the world for tracing the prehistory of human endeavor over a period in excess of two million years. It lies in the direct path of successive migrations from the African homeland that saw settlement by hominin populations such as Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis. The first Anatomically Modern Humans, following a coastal route, reached the region at least 60,000 years ago to establish a hunter gatherer tradition that survives to this day in remote forests. From about 2000 BC, human settlement of Southeast Asia was deeply affected by successive innovations that took place to the north and west, such as rice and millet farming. A millennium later, knowledge of bronze casting penetrated along the same pathways. Copper mines were identified and exploited, and metals were exchanged over hundreds of kilometers. In the Mekong Delta and elsewhere, these developments led to early states of the region, which benefitted from an agricultural revolution involving permanent ploughed rice fields. These developments illuminate how the great early kingdoms of Angkor, Champa, and Funan came to be, a vital stage in understanding the roots of the present nation states of Southeast Asia. Assembling the most current research across a variety of disciplines-from anthropology and archaeology to history, art history, and linguistics-The Oxford Handbook of Early Southeast Asia will present an invaluable resource to experienced researchers and those approaching the topic for the first time.

Please note: This product is a map. It was more than just a wall: it was a whole military zone designed to control movement across the northern frontier of the Roman province of Britannia. Great earthwork barriers survive, along with the remains of forts and temporary camps; watch-towers and fortified gates; civilian settlements, temples, cemeteries, bath-houses, roads and bridges. Stretching across the spine of England from the North-East coast to the Irish Sea, the line of the frontier extends for over 100 miles through every type of landscape: from the streets of urban Tyneside, through arable fields; along the crags of the wild Whin Sill; to the sands of the Solway, and down the coast of Cumbria. Drawing upon the extensive expertise and unrivalled archives of English Heritage, and those of its partners, this map depicts the fruits of modern archaeological research: in field survey, geophysics, excavation, and the analysis of aerial photographs. Using Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 data - the ideal scale for walkers - this revised new map shows with great clarity all the elements of Hadrian's Wall, and distinguishes between those features that are visible and those that have been levelled through time. A brief text explains the remains on the ground, and how to use the map to find them - including the museums and the best places to visit. This World Heritage Site is now more accessible than ever before, so see the landscape through new eyes.

In The Socio-economic Organisation of the Urartian Kingdom, Ali Cifci presents a detailed study of the life of the highland communities of eastern Anatolia, Armenia and north-west Iran between the 9th and 6th centuries BC. In doing so, the author uses archaeological excavations, surveys, and textual evidence from both Urartian and Assyrian sources, as well as original ethnographic observations, within the context of the geographical setting of the Urartu Kingdom. This book investigates various aspects of the Urartian Kingdom from its economic resources and the movement of commodities (agriculture, animal husbandry, metallurgy, trade, etc.) to the management of those resources and the administrative organisation of the state. This includes the Urartian concept of kingship and the king's role in administration, construction, the division of the kingdom, as well as the income generated by warfare. "There are several key philological and archaeological works that propel the field of Urartian studies and provide dialogue partners for Urartologists and historians of Anatolia and the ancient Near East...Ali Cifci's The Socio-Economic Organisation of the Urartian Kingdom can be included as a partner in dialogue when researching Urartu and Iron Age Anatolian archaeology..." Selim Ferruh Adali, Social Sciences University of Ankara, in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2018.07.22.

This volume, Overturning Certainties in Near Eastern Archaeology, is a festschrift dedicated to Professor K. Aslihan Yener in honor of over four decades of exemplary research, teaching, fieldwork, and publication. The thirty-five chapters presented by her colleagues includes a broad, interdisciplinary range of studies in archaeology, archaeometry, art history, and epigraphy of the Ancient Near East, especially reflecting Prof Yener's interests in metallurgy, small finds, trade, Anatolia, and the site of Tell Atchana/Alalakh. "The richness of this volume inevitably emerges from those contributions on exchange and technology using philology and/or archaeology." - David A. Warburton, Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations, Northeast Normal University, in: Bibliotheca Orientalis 76,1-2 (2019)

The royal necropolis of New Kingdom Egypt, known as the Valley of the Kings (KV), is one of the most important-and celebrated-archaeological sites in the world. Located on the west bank of the Nile river, about three miles west of modern Luxor, the valley is home to more than sixty tombs, all dating to the second millennium BCE. The most famous of these is the tomb of Tutankhamun, first discovered by Howard Carter in 1922. Other famous pharaoh's interred here include Hatshepsut, the only queen found in the valley, and Ramesses II, ancient Egypt's greatest ruler. Much has transpired in the study and exploration of the Valley of the Kings over the last few years. Several major discoveries have been made, notably the many-chambered KV5 (tomb of the sons of Ramesses II) and KV 63, a previously unknown tomb found in the heart of the valley. Many areas of the royal valley have been explored for the first time using new technologies, revealing ancient huts, shrines, and stelae. New studies of the DNA, filiation, cranio-facial reconstructions, and other aspects of the royal mummies have produced important and sometimes controversial results. The Oxford Handbook of the Valley of the Kings provides an up-to-date and thorough reference designed to fill a very real gap in the literature of Egyptology. It will be an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers, and researchers with an interest in this key area of Egyptian archaeology. First, introductory chapters locate the Valley of the Kings in space and time. Subsequent chapters offer focused examinations of individual tombs: their construction, content, development, and significance. Finally, the book discusses the current status of ongoing issues of preservation and archaeology, such as conservation, tourism, and site management. In addition to recent work mentioned above, aerial imaging, remote sensing, studies of the tombs' architectural and decorative symbolism, problems of conservation site management, and studies of KV-related temples are just some of the aspects not covered in any other work on the Valley of the Kings. This volume promises to become the primary scholarly reference work on this important World Heritage Site.

Thanks to powerful innovations in archaeology and other types of historical research, we now have a picture of everyday life in the Mayan empire that turns the long-accepted conventional wisdom on its head. Ranging from the end of the Ice Age to the flourishing of Mayan culture in the first millennium to the Spanish conquest in the 16th century, The Ancient Maya takes a fresh look at a culture that has long held the public's imagination. Originally thought to be peaceful and spiritual, the Mayans are now also known to have been worldly, bureaucratic, and violent. Debates and unanswered questions linger. Mayan expert Heather McKillop shows our current understanding of the Maya, explaining how interpretations of "dirt archaeology," hieroglyphic inscriptions, and pictorial pottery are used to reconstruct the lives of royalty, artisans, priests, and common folk. She also describes the innovative focus on the interplay of the people with their environments that has helped further unravel the mystery of the Mayans' rise and fall.