Divine and Human Hate in the Ancient Near East studies lexemes for 'hate' in Biblical Hebrew, Ugaritic, and Akkadian. Riley conducts a lexical study of three 'hate' terms, along with comparative analysis of divine and human hate in biblical, Ugaritic, and Mesopotamian literature.

A detailed archaeological study of life in Egypt's Eastern desert during the Roman period by a leading scholar Rome in Egypt's Eastern Desert is a two-volume set collecting Helene Cuvigny's most important articles on Egypt's Eastern desert during the Roman period. The excavations that she has directed have uncovered a wealth of material, including tens of thousands of texts written on pottery fragments (ostraca). Some of these are administrative texts, but many more are correspondence, both official and private, written by and to the people (mostly but not all men) who lived and worked in these remote and harsh environments, supported by an elaborate network of defense, administration and supply that tied the entire region together. The contents of Rome in Egypt's Eastern Desert have all been published earlier in peer-reviewed venues, but almost entirely in French. All of the contributions have been translated by the editor and brought up to date with respect to bibliography and in some cases significantly rewritten by the author, in order to take account of the enormous amount of new material discovered in the intervening time and subsequent publications. A full index makes this body of work far more accessible than it was before. This book brings together thirty years of detailed study of this material, conjuring in vivid detail the lived experience of those who inhabited these forts--often through their own expressive language--and the realia of desert geography, military life, sex, religion, quarry operations, and imperial administration in the Roman world.

The The Olsztyn Group in the Early Medieval Archaeology of the Baltic Region: The Cemetry at Leleszki deals with a much neglected problem of the archaeology of the early Middle Ages. Between the 5th and the 7th century, the region of the Mazurian Lakes in northeastern Poland witnessed the rise of communities engaged in long-distant contacts with both Western and Eastern Europe. Known as the Olsztyn Group, the archaeological remains of those communities have revealed a remarkable wealth and diversity, which has attracted scholarly attention for more than 130 years. Besides offering a survey of the current state of research on the Olsztyn Group, Miroslaw Rudnicki introduces the monographic study of the Leleszki cemetery (district of Szczytno, Poland) as one of the most representative sites. The prosperity and long-distance contact revealed by the examination of this cemetery shows that the West Baltic tribes had considerable influence in early medieval Europe, much more than scholars had been ready to admit until now.

While prayer is generally understood as "communion with God" modern forms of spirituality prefer "communion" that is non-petitionary and wordless. This preference has unduly influenced modern scholarship on historic methods of prayer particularly concerning Anglo-Saxon spirituality. In Compelling God, Stephanie Clark examines the relationship between prayer, gift giving, the self, and community in Anglo-Saxon England. Clark's analysis of the works of Bede, Aelfric, and Alfred utilizes anthropologic and economic theories of exchange in order to reveal the ritualized, gift-giving relationship with God that Anglo-Saxon prayer espoused. Anglo-Saxon prayer therefore should be considered not merely within the usual context of contemplation, rumination, and meditation but also within the context of gift exchange, offering, and sacrifice. Compelling God allows us to see how practices of prayer were at the centre of social connections through which Anglo-Saxons conceptualized a sense of their own personal and communal identity.