This volume collects 33 papers that were presented at the international conference held at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in November 2015 to celebrate the centenary of Bedrich Hrozny's identification of Hittite as an Indo-European language. Contributions are grouped into three sections, "Hrozny and His Discoveries," "Hittite and Indo-European," and "The Hittites and Their Neighbors," and span the full range of Hittite studies and related disciplines, from Anatolian and Indo-European linguistics and cuneiform philology to Ancient Near Eastern archaeology, history, and religion. The authors hail from 15 countries and include leading figures as well as emerging scholars in the fields of Hittitology, Indo-European, and Ancient Near Eastern studies.

From 1981 until 1986, the archaeologist Judith McKenzie, then a graduate student at the University of Sydney, travelled to the ancient site of Petra in Jordan, living in a cave there for extended periods, in order to survey and measure architectural mouldings on the rock-cut monuments. It was a critical time in the history of Petra, where, for centuries, its local inhabitants, known as the Bdoul, had lived and worked. But that tradition was coming to a close. In 1985, the Bdoul began a move to the nearby village of Umm Sayhoun, as directed by the Jordanian government. This first-hand account of life in a cave at Petra, based on diaries Judith kept at the time she lived among the Bdoul, is therefore important as a record of a lifestyle now largely vanished. As she writes in her introduction: "I spent so much time socializing with the Bdoul, I came to observe many aspects of Bdoul life in a series of visits over three main field seasons. As women we had access to the world of young girls and women, which men from outside did not, while we were also sometimes treated as honorary men." This memoir thus stands as a reminder of life at Petra before the arrival of modern-day tourism at the site. But this book is not only a memoir. Observations are made on the ways in which the Bdoul have adapted to their new environment. Changes at the site that have taken place since 1981 because of weathering and erosion are recorded through comparisons between photographs taken forty years ago and more recent images. Ramifications of the expansion of the tourist-industry at Petra in the 21st century are also considered. Life in a Cave in Petra with the Bdoul: 1981-1986 is therefore an important and essential volume on the archaeology and history of one of the best-known ancient sites in the world.

This book studies Egyptian ideas about death and the afterlife during the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods. Mark Smith analyses Egyptian attitudes toward death, looks at the various means by which the Egyptians attempted to ensure a smooth transition from existence in this world to that in the next, and examines how they envisaged life in the hereafter. Traversing Eternity is based on a corpus of sixty texts specially selected for the light which they throw upon these topics. Some of the texts are ritual in character, and were recited for the benefit of the deceased by priests, while others were interred along with the dead so that they themselves could make use of them in the afterlife. Each text is translated in its entirety, with annotation to elucidate obscure points, and each is supplied with a detailed introduction. Smith also addresses key issues such as that of continuity and change in Egyptian religious beliefs during the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods and attempts to answer the question of why the composition of texts for the afterlife flourished to such a remarkable extent at this time.

In The Amorite Dynasty of Ugarit Mary Buck takes a new approach to the field of Amorite studies by considering whether the site of Ugarit shares close parallels with other sites and cultures known from the Bronze Age Levant. When viewed in conjunction, the archaeological and linguistic material uncovered in this study serves to enhance our understanding of the historical complexity and diversity of the Middle Bronze Age period of international relations at the site of Ugarit. With a deft hand, Dr. Buck pursues a nuanced view of populations in the Bronze Age Levant, with the objective of understanding the ancient polity of Ugarit as a kin-based culture that shares close ties with the Amorite populations of the Levant. "The author covers a contentious area of scholarship with confidence and competence, and has produced a convincing case for the Amorite origins of Bronze Age Ugarit." -Nick Wyatt, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 44.5 (2020) The Studies in the Archaeology and History of the Levant series publishes volumes from the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East. Other series offered by Brill that publish volumes from the Museum include Harvard Semitic Studies and Harvard Semitic Monographs, https://hmane.harvard.edu/publications.

The inside story, told by the archaeological detectives themselves, of the extraordinary discovery of the world's oldest papyri - revealing how King Khufu's men built the Great Pyramid at Giza. Pierre Tallet's discovery of the Red Sea Scrolls - the world's oldest surviving written documents - in 2013 was one of the most remarkable moments in the history of Egyptology. These papyri, written some 4,600 years ago, combined with Mark Lehner's research and theories, change what we thought we knew about the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza. Here, for the first time, Tallet and Lehner together give us the definitive account of this astounding discovery. The story begins with Tallet's hunt for hieroglyphic rock inscriptions in the Sinai Peninsula, leading up to the discovery of the papyri - the diary of Inspector Merer, who oversaw workers in the reign of Pharaoh Khufu - in Wadi el-Jarf, the site of an ancient harbour on the Red Sea. The translation of the papyri reveals for the first time exactly how the stones of the Great Pyramid were transported to Giza. Combined with Lehner's excavations of the recently unearthed harbour, the Red Sea Papyri have greatly advanced our understanding of how the ancient Egyptians were able to build monuments that survive to this day. Tallet and Lehner narrate this thrilling discovery and explore how the building of the pyramids helped create a unified state, propelling Egyptian civilization forward. This lavishly illustrated book captures the excitement and significance of these seminal findings, conveying above all how astonishing it is to discover a contemporary eye-witness testimony to the creation of the only remaining Wonder of the Ancient World. With over 200 illustrations

Johan David Akerblad (1763-1819) contributed to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Demotic and is known as a predecessor of Jean-Francois Champollion. This intellectual biography offers a new and less heroic interpretation of the first reading of the Egyptian scripts. Akerblad, an exceptional linguist, was a diplomat and orientalist who spent several decades living in the Ottoman Empire, France and Italy. Of humble birth, he was a supporter of the French Revolution - something that stymied his career. His life cannot be understood in a purely Swedish national framework, and this study firmly situates him as an international scholar. The book discusses European expansion in the Eastern Mediterranean during the tumultuous decades around the year 1800, and traces Akerblad's momentous life in relation to the debates on 'orientalism,' the tradition of classical studies and the history of science.

The Compendium of World Sovereigns series contains three volumes Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern. These volumes provide students with easy-to-access 'who's who' with details the identities and dates, with ages and wives, where known, of heads of government in any given state at any time within the framework of reference. The relevant original and secondary sources are also listed in a comprehensive bibliography. Providing a clear reference guide for students, to who was who and when they ruled in the Dynasties and other ruler-lists for the Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern worlds - primarily European and Middle Eastern but including available information on Africa and Asia and the pre-Columbian Americas. The trilogy accesses and interprets the original data plus any modern controversies and disputes over names and dating, reflecting on the shifts in and widening of focus in student and academic studies. Each volume contains league tables of rulers' 'records', and an extensive bibliographical guide to the relevant personnel and dynasties, plus any controversies, so readers can consult these for extra details and know exactly where to go for which information. All relevant information is collected and provided as a one-stop-shop for students wishing to check the known information about a world Sovereign. The Ancient volume begins with the Pharaohs in Egypt and moves through Greece, Classical and Early Mediaeval Armenia, Crimea, Syria, Jordan, Israel and Judah, Persia, India and ends with the Roman World in the east and west. A Compendium of World Sovereigns: Volume I Ancient provides students and scholars with the perfect reference guide to support their studies and to fact check dates, people, and places.

This book concerns the ancient rock-cut monuments carved throughout the Near East, paying particular attention to the fate of these monuments in the centuries after their initial production. As parts of the landscapes in which they were carved, they acquired new meanings in the cultural memory of the people living around them. The volume joins numerous recent studies on the reception of historical texts and artefacts, exploring the peculiar affordances of these long-lasting and often salient monuments. The volume gathers articles by archeologists, art historians, and philologists, covering the entire Near East, from Iran to Lebanon and from Turkey to Egypt. It also analyzes long-lasting textual traditions that aim to explain the origins and meaning of rock-cut monuments and other related carvings.

In the hearts of London and New York stand their two oldest public monuments, Cleopatra's Needles, the last of a series of obelisks from Ancient Egypt to be moved abroad during a period of over two thousand years. This book uses the Needles to examine how objects embody the cultures that create them, and how the use, value, and meaning of these objects change as they are transferred between cultures by gift, sale, barter, or theft. It explores the way in which obelisks functioned as imperial trophies, how their transfer was part of the complex political manoeuvring between European powers, America, the Ottoman Empire, and the semi-autonomous rulers of Egypt, and how their acquisition reflected the relative power of these parties. In contrast, it also examines the crucial role that private individuals and finance played in the acquisition and transport of the obelisks, and how popular understanding of them, and of the culture they came from, often differed from those of social and professional elites. It also relates the Needles to contemporary debates about the ownership of cultural artefacts, the legacy of colonial history, and the nature of reception as the process of understanding and valuing the past and its surviving material and immaterial culture.

Nearly two-thirds of the New Testament--including all of the letters of Paul, most of the book of Acts, and the book of Revelation--is set outside of Israel, in either Turkey or Greece. Although biblically-oriented tours of the areas that were once ancient Greece and Asia Minor have become increasingly popular, up until now there has been no definitive guidebook through these important sites.

In A Guide to Biblical Sites in Greece and Turkey, two well-known, well-traveled biblical scholars offer a fascinating historical and archaeological guide to these sites. The authors reveal countless new insights into the biblical text while reliably guiding the traveler through every significant location mentioned in the Bible. The book completely traces the journeys of the Apostle Paul across Turkey (ancient Asia Minor), Greece, and the islands of the Mediterranean. A description of the location and history of each site is given, followed by an intriguing discussion of its biblical significance. Clearly written and in non-technical language, the work links the latest in biblical research with recent archaeological findings. A visit to the site is described, complete with easy-to-follow walking directions, indicating the major items of archaeological interest. Detailed site maps, historical charts, and maps of the regions are integrated into the text, and a glossary of terms is provided.

Easy to use and abundantly illustrated, this unique guide will help visitors to Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus appreciate the rich history, significance, and great wonder of the ancient world of the Bible.

Citadel and Cemetery in Early Bronze Age Anatolia is the first synthetic and interpretive monograph on the region and time period (ca. 3000-2200 BCE). The book organizes this vast, dense and often obscure archaeological corpus into thematic chapters, and isolates three primary contexts for analysis: the settlements and households of villages, the cemeteries of villages, and the monumental citadels of agrarian elites. The book is a study of contrasts between the social logic and ideological/ritual panoply of villages and citadels. The material culture, social organization and social life of Early Bronze Age villages is not radically different from the farming settlements of earlier periods in Anatolia. On the other hand, the monumental citadel is unprecedented; the material culture of the Early Bronze Age citadel informs the beginning of a long era in Anatolia, defined by the existence of an agrarian elite who exaggerated inequality and the degree of separation from those who did not live on citadels. This is a study of the ascendance of the citadel ca. 2600 BCE, and related consequences for villages in Early Bronze Age Anatolia.

Brings together two academic fields that have been infrequently in full conversation: papyrology and the study of religion. Offers the latest research on the topic, focusing on a diverse range of case studies from different religious groups and documents written in numerous contemporary languages.

'Impeccably researched and beautifully written' David Wengrow 'Utterly original' Paul Strathern When it was found in 1922, the 3,300-year old tomb of Tutankhamun sent shockwaves around the world, turning the boy-king into a household name overnight and kickstarting an international media obsession that endures to this day. From pop culture and politics to tourism and heritage, and from the Jazz Age to the climate crisis, it's impossible to imagine the twentieth century without the discovery of Tutankhamun - yet so much of the story remains untold. Here, for the first time, Christina Riggs weaves compelling historical analysis with tales of lives touched by an encounter with Tutankhamun, including her own. Treasured offers a bold new history of the young pharaoh who has as much to tell us about our world as his own. 'Searching, masterful and eloquent' James Delbourgo

Sister-Queens in the High Hellenistic Period is a cutting-edge exploration of ancient queenship and the significance of family politics in the dysfunctional dynasties of the late Hellenistic world. This volume, the first full-length study of Kleopatra III and Kleopatra Thea and their careers as queens of Egypt and Syria, thoroughly examines the roles and ideology of royal daughters, wives, and queens in Egypt, the ancient Near East, and ancient Israel and provides a comprehensive study of the iconography, public image, and titles of each queen and their cultural precedents. In addition, this book also offers an introduction to the critical concept of the 'High Hellenistic Period' and the maturation of royal female power in the second century BCE. Sister-Queens in the High Hellenistic Period is suitable for students and scholars in ancient history, Egyptology, classics, and gender studies, as well as the general reader interested in ancient queenship, ancient Egypt, the Hellenistic world, and gender in antiquity.

The links between archaeology and the Bible have fascinated generations of archaeologists and biblical scholars who seek documentation of events narrated in the Bible. The British Museum's collections include numerous inscribed objects, scripts and pictorial reliefs which provide such evidence. There is, for example, a Babylonian clay tablet which records Nebuchadnezzar's siege of Jerusalem in 597 BC, as narrated in the book of Jeremiah. For this book the author has selected over seventy such 'documents', mainly from Western Asia, with some examples included from Greece, Egypt and Asia Minor, dating from the period of the Patriarchs to the New Testament times, c. 2000 BC to c. AD 100. He transliterates and translates the ancient texts, which include Cuneiform, Aramaic and Hebrew, and discusses the contribution they make to our knowledge of the culture and history of biblical times. Each object is illustrated in black and white.

In this lively treatment of one of antiquity's most mysterious civilizations, whose history disappeared from the records over 3,000 years ago, Trevor Bryce sheds fresh light on Hittite warriors as well as on the Hittites' social, religious and political culture and offers new solutions to many unsolved questions. Revealing them to have been masters of chariot warfare, who almost inflicted a disastrous defeat on Rameses II at the Battle of Qadesh (1274 BCE), he shows the Hittites also to have been devout worshippers of a pantheon of storm-gods and many other gods, and masters of a new diplomatic system which bolstered their authority for centuries. Drawing authoritatively both on texts and on ongoing archaeological discoveries, while at the same time offering imaginative reconstructions of the Hittite world, Bryce argues that while the development of a warrior culture was essential, not only for the Empire's expansion but for its very survival, this by itself was not enough. The range of skills demanded of the Hittite ruling class went way beyond mere military prowess, while there was much more to the Hittites themselves than just skill in warfare. This engaging volume reveals the Hittites in their full complexity, including the festivals they celebrated; the temples and palaces they built; their customs and superstitions; the crimes they committed; their social hierarchy, from king to slave; and the marriages and pre-nuptial agreements they contracted. It takes the reader on a journey which combines epic grandeur, spectacle and pageantry with an understanding of the intimacies and idiosyncrasies of Hittite daily life.

Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom offers a new history of the field of Egyptian monastic archaeology. It is the first study in English to trace how scholars identified a space or site as monastic within the Egyptian landscape and how such identifications impacted perceptions of monasticism. Brooks Hedstrom then provides an ecohistory of Egypt's tripartite landscape to offer a reorientation of the perception of the physical landscape. She analyzes late-antique documentary evidence, early monastic literature, and ecclesiastical history before turning to the extensive archaeological evidence of Christian monastic settlements. In doing so, she illustrates the stark differences between idealized monastic landscape and the actual monastic landscape that was urbanized through monastic constructions. Drawing upon critical theories in landscape studies, materiality and phenomenology, Brooks Hedstrom looks at domestic settlements of non-monastic and monastic settlements to posit what features makes monastic settlements unique, thus offering a new history of monasticism in Egypt.

Veronique Dasen here examines dwarfs in myth and everyday life in ancient Egypt and Greece. In both cultures physical beauty was highly admired, even to excess. What happened to those whose appearance did not conform to the `ideal proportion'? The spectacular forms of dwarfism were always a focus of interest, and it is the most depicted disorder in antiquity. In this study Dr Dasen brings together for the first time a whole range of mostly unpublished or little known iconographic, epigraphic, literary, and anthropological evidence. She covers areas such as the history of caricature and the portrait; medical history, in particular the development of the perception of congenital disorders; social history; and history of religion, with questions on the magical and ritual efficacy of the malformed in sacred and theatrical contexts. She considers also the complex relations between mythology and ethnography, as shown, for example, in the Greek myth of the Pygmies. This is a fascinating work, with a wealth of insights for anyone interested in the history of medicine or the ancient world.

The second edition expands upon the series of experiments that test and evaluate over two hundred reconstructed and replica tools, bringing alive the methods and practices of ancient Egyptian craftworking. It introduces the results of new research to increase our understanding of the fundamental development of stoneworking, and other, supporting technologies, in Ancient Egypt, this book remains an important volume for students and researchers wishing to understand Ancient Egyptian technology and development.

Offers an up to date exploration of Egyptian society. The case study format allows students to grasp the material, while also teaching them how to analyse evidence and make judgements about challenging social issues.

First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In The City Gate in Ancient Israel and Her Neighbors, Daniel A. Frese provides a wide-ranging portrayal of one of the most prominent social institutions in the kingdoms of the southern Levant during the Iron II period: the use of the city gate as a hub for numerous and diverse civic functions. The book provides an up-to-date description of the architecture of gate complexes based on archaeological evidence, and a systematic description of the many functions of the gate seen in hundreds of texts from the Hebrew Bible and the broader ancient Near East. The final chapters of the book discuss the conceptual significance of gates in Israelite culture, based on idiomatic and symbolic gate terminology in the Hebrew Bible.

For the past 200 years archaeological work has provided new information that allows us to peer into the past and open chapters of human history that have not been read for centuries, or even millennia. In The Archaeology of the Bible James K. Hoffmeier provides the reader with an incisive account of archaeology's role in shaping our understanding of the biblical texts. Fundamental issues addressed throughout include how archaeological discoveries relate to biblical accounts, and the compatibility of using scientific disciplines to prove or disprove a religious book such as the Bible. This work is an ideal introduction to the societies and events of the Ancient Near East and their relation to our interpretation of the Bible.

The Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) is the oldest exploration society of the Levant which is active today. Since its founding meeting in 1865 in Westminster Abbey of London, the PEF scholars have conducted systematic exploration of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Prominent archaeologists such as C.W. Wilson, C. Warren, C. Schick, C. Conder, W.M.F Petrie, H. Kitchener, and R.A.S Macalister, were sent to dig the Holy Land on behalf of the PEF. A remarkable enterprise carried out by the PEF, in cooperation with the Royal Engineers, was the first precise scientific survey of the region - The Survey of the Western Palestine - which yielded the pioneering high-quality detailed maps of the Holy Land. Marking the 150 years since the PEF emerged, the studies collected in this volume provide a retrospective on the endeavours in the light of the findings of the contemporary archaeological research.

Offers the latest research on this topic. Offers a unique insight into the economic effects of imperial pacification, taxation, and tribute in and around the Galilee before and after the First Jewish Revolt against Rome. Directly engages with tax documents and other ancient texts in detail.