In 1885, a large hypogeum was discovered at the Saint-E'tienne Compound, the domain acquired only two and a half years before by the Dominicans on the western slope of El Heidhemiyeh hill, about 250 m north of the Jerusalem Ottoman wall. After the unearthing of a second large hypogeum, only fifty metres north of Hypogeum 1, in their monumental work on the history of Jerusalem, the two eminent Dominican scholars Louis-Hugues Vincent and Felix-Marie Abel proposed to date the two burial complexes to the Hellenistic or Roman period. This dating remained unchallenged until the survey of 1974-75, carried out by the distinguished Israeli archaeologists Gabriel Barkay and Amos Kloner, who proposed to date the two burial caves towards the end of the Judahite kingdom, on the basis of an unsystematic comparison of few architectural features with those of other tombs. In the frame of the improved knowledge of the broad and adjacent archaeological contexts since the last study of the Saint-E'tienne Compound Hypogea, between 2011 and 2014 Riccardo Lufrani carried out a detailed survey of the two burial caves, providing new and more detailed photographic, topographic, archaeological and geological documentation. The systematic comparison of the significant architectural features of the Saint-E'tienne Compound Hypogea with a consistent sample of 22 tombs in the region suggest dating the hewing of the two hypogea to the Early Hellenistic period, shedding a new light on the history of Jerusalem.

Stretching across the historical region of Mesopotamia, the Akkadian dynasty (ca. 2334-2154 BCE) created a territorial state of unprecedented scale in the ancient Near East by uniting the city-states of Sumer and Akkad and parts of Syria and Iran. To establish and, later, cement their authority over disparate peoples and places, the kings used art and visual culture to extraordinary effect. Exemplars of Kingship conveys the astonishing life of the art of the Akkadian kings by assessing ancient and modern responses to its dynamic forms and transformative ideologies of kingship. For nearly two thousand years after their reign, the Akkadian kings were remembered as exemplary rulers. Modern assessments of ancient memories of Akkadian kingship have concentrated on textual attestations of the kings' place in cultural memory. This book considers the contributions of images to memories of Akkadian kingship. Through close readings of the visuals that remain, Melissa Eppihimer discusses how Akkadian steles, statues, and cylinder seals became models for later rulers in Mesopotamia and beyond who wished to emulate or critique the Akkadian kings-and how these rulers and their contemporaries were reminded of the Akkadian past when they looked at images. Exemplars of Kingship is, therefore, a book about Akkadian art and its reception in antiquity, but it is also concerned with the modern reception of Akkadian art and kingship. It argues that modern responses have constrained our understanding of ancient responses. Through a wide range of examples drawn from almost two millennia, the book highlights the individual decisions that prompted continuity and change during the long history of Mesopotamia and its artistic traditions.

Philip King utilizes archaeological artifacts and texts of the late seventh and early sixth centuries BCE, many of them unpublished or not easily accessible, to elucidate the text of the book of Jeremiah, a book that is sometimes described as difficult and whose formation is complicated. By doing so, he adds important spatial and temporal dimension to the history of Israel and to the literature about the life of one of its most significant prophets: Jeremiah.

In this magisterial work the history of the peoples of Palestine from the earliest times to Alexander's conquest is thoroughly sifted and interpreted. All available source material-textural, epigraphic, and archeological-is considered, and the approach taken aims at a dispassionate reconstruction of the major epochs and events by the analysis of social, political, military, and economic phenomena. The book, chronologically structured, is indispensable for the study of the Hebrew Bible and of the ancient Near East.

From generation to generation, people experience their landscapes differently. Humans depend on their natural environment: it shapes their behaviour while it is often felt that deities responsible for both natural benefits and natural calamities (such as droughts, famines, floods and landslides) need to be appeased. We presume that, in many societies, lakes, rivers, rocks, mountains, caves and groves were considered sacred. Individual sites and entire landscapes are often associated with divine actions, mythical heroes and etiological myths. Throughout human history, people have also felt the need to monumentalise their sacred landscape. But this is where the similarities end as different societies had very different understandings, believes and practises. The aim of this new thematic appraisal is to scrutinise carefully our evidence and rethink our methodologies in a multi-disciplinary approach. More than 30 papers investigate diverse sacred landscapes from the Iberian peninsula and Britain in the west to China in the east. They discuss how to interpret the intricate web of ciphers and symbols in the landscape and how people might have experienced it. We see the role of performance, ritual, orality, textuality and memory in people's sacred landscapes. A diachronic view allows us to study how landscapes were 'rewritten', adapted and redefined in the course of time to suit new cultural, political and religious understandings, not to mention the impact of urbanism on people's understandings. A key question is how was the landscape manipulated, transformed and monumentalised - especially the colossal investments in monumental architecture we see in certain socio-historic contexts or the creation of an alternative humanmade, seemingly 'non-natural' landscape, with perfectly astronomically aligned buildings that define a cosmological order? Sacred Landscapes therefore aims to analyse the complex links between landscape, 'religiosity' and society, developing a dialectic framework that explores sacred landscapes across the ancient world in a dynamic, holistic, contextual and historical perspective.

This historical survey of the relationship between archaeology and biblical studies in the archaeological excavations in Palestine at Tell el-Hesi from 1840 to 1990 concentrates on the work of major excavators and scholars. It is a panoramic overview of the methods and theories that served to illuminate the archaeology of the Holy Land, beginning with and introductory chapter that covers the early pioneering years before the work of Pitt Rivers and Petrie.

The prominence of phallic symbols in high ancient religious systems has never before been understood, much less sanely expounded and vindicated as something transcending gross sensualism. It is not too much to assert that in this work sex is given its truly lofty place and rated at its exalted character for the first time in religious literature. For not only is sex revealed as the truest key-symbol of the supreme significance of human life itself, but it is brilliantly analyzed as to its place and function in the individual human's program of evolution, his sanity, balance, mental health and happiness. If it is possible for one book to lift sex from low and base regard to a veritable pinnacle of purity and nobility in the light of its true character, this book will do it. Partial Contents: Bright Lexicon of Deity; Drama Bears Misshapen Offspring; And God Spake Unto Moses; The God's Distribute Divinity; Lost Data of Anthropology; Two Subterranean Grottoes; In Pluto's Dark Realm; The Two Mothers of the Christ; Immanuel's Lamp; Child is Father of the Man; Language of Lingham and Yoni; Phallicism Transfigured; Love and Hate; Love Looks Beyond Death; Romance in the Trysting-Tent; Phoenix Lives Again; Oil of Gladness; My Cup Runneth Over.

The revolutionary cult of sun-worship that Akhenaten introduced, and such contentious issues as the role of Nefertiti as a goddess, the dominant part played by plague during Akhenaten's reign, and likely events of the king's twilight years are treated with new insight and set within the framework of an authoritative overview of the entire period.

Many times when the author saw the bedouins of southern Sinai excavate their wells in the crystalline rocks, from which this part of the peninsula is built, the story of Moses striking the rock to get water came to mind. The reader will, indeed, find in this book the description for a rather simple method by which to strike the rock to get water in the wilderness of Sinai. Yet this method was not invented by the author nor by any other modem hydrogeologist, but was a method that the author learned from the bedouins living in the crystalline mountains of southern Sinai. These bedouins, belonging to the tribe of the Gebelia (the "mountain people"), live around the monastery of Santa Katerina and, according to their tradition, which has been conftrmed by historical research, were once Christians who were brought by the Byzantine emperor, Justinian, from the Balkans in the 6th century A. D. to be servants to the priests of the monastery. They know how to discern places where veins of calcite fIlled the fractures of the granites; such places are a sign of an extinct spring. They also know how to distinguish an acid hard granite rock, and hard porphyry dike from a soft diabase dike. The latter indicated the location at which they should dig for water into the subsurface. In Chapter 9, the reader will ftnd a detailed description of how they used this knowledge to extract water from the rock.

In this interdisciplinary study, Leire Olabarria examines ancient Egyptian society through the notion of kinship. Drawing on methods from archaeology and sociocultural anthropology, she provides an emic characterisation of ancient kinship that relies on performative aspects of social interaction. Olabarria uses memorial stelae of the First Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom (ca.2150-1650 BCE) as her primary evidence. Contextualising these monuments within their social and physical landscapes, she proposes a dynamic way to explore kin groups through sources that have been considered static. The volume offers three case studies of kin groups at the beginning, peak, and decline of their developmental cycles respectively. They demonstrate how ancient Egyptian evidence can be used for cross-cultural comparison of key anthropological topics, such as group formation, patronage, and rites of passage.

The Ancient Art of Transformation: Case Studies from Mediterranean Contexts examines instances of human transformation in the ancient and early Christian Mediterranean world by exploring the ways in which art impacts, aids, or provides evidence for physical, spiritual, personal, and social transitions. Building on Arnold van Gennep's notion of universal rites of passage, papers in this volume expand the definition of "transformation" to include widespread transitions such as shifts in political establishments and changes in cultural identity. In considering these broadly defined "passages," authors have observed particular changes in the visual record, whether they be manifest, enigmatic, or symbolic. While several papers address transitions that are incomplete, resulting in intermediary, hybrid states, others suggest that the medium itself can be integral to interpreting a transition, and in some cases, be itself transformed. Together, the volume covers not only a broad chronological span (c. 5th century BC to 4th century AD), but also an expansive geographical range (Egypt, Greece, and Italy). Reflecting upon issues central to a variety of Mediterranean cultures (Egyptians, Etruscans, Greeks, Romans, and early Christians), The Ancient Art of Transformation documents how personal, societal, and historical changes become permanently fixed in the material record. The Ancient Art of Transformation examines the visual manifestation of human transformation in the ancient and early medieval Mediterranean world, exploring the role of art and visual culture in enabling, hindering, or documenting physical, spiritual, personal, and social transitions such as pregnancy and birth, initiations, marriage, death and funerals. The definition of "transformation" is also expanded to address instances of less personal and more widespread transitions such as shifts in political establishments and changes in cultural identity in geographic locations. Additionally, although the ancient material record documents certain rites of passage such as marriage and death extensively, artifacts and their accompanying images are often studied simply to reconstruct these social processes. Authors here suggest that material evidence itself can be integral to interpreting a transition, and in some cases, be itself transformed. Further, several papers address transitions that are incomplete, resulting in intermediary, hybrid states that are very often reflected in the visual record such as Athenian vase-painting imagery forecasting the bride as a mother, displays of nudity that reflect intermediate life stages in Etruscan art and Octavian's visual transformation into Pharaoh and Augustus in Egyptian architecture and material culture. At its core the volume establishes current methods for understanding how ancient visual culture shaped, informed, and was affected by processes of transformation. Together, these papers offer a close examination of various types of visual evidence from several cultures and periods (e.g., Etruscan, Greek, Roman, early Christian), and document how personal, societal, historical changes become permanently fixed in the material record.

The recovery of the history of the ancient Near East through archaeology is one of the major achievements of the modern age. Although the impact of this new knowledge on biblical matters is briefly surveyed, the main concern of this book is with the methods that archaeologists use in going about their work. Lance discusses the principles of excavation and how materials recovered are brought to bear on biblical studies. The book explains in detail the principles of stratigraphy and typology, suggests practical ways for the beginner to find needed information in the confusing array of primary and secondary publications, and takes a brief look at the future of biblical archaeology as a discipline.

The unique relationship between word and image in ancient Egypt is a defining feature of that ancient culture's records. All hieroglyphic texts are composed of images, and large-scale figural imagery in temples and tombs is often accompanied by texts. Epigraphy and palaeography are two distinct, but closely related, ways of recording, analyzing, and interpreting texts and images. This Handbook stresses technical issues about recording text and art and interpretive questions about what we do with those records and why we do it. It offers readers three key things: a diachronic perspective, covering all ancient Egyptian scripts from prehistoric Egypt through the Coptic era (fourth millennium BCE-first half of first millennium CE), a look at recording techniques that considers the past, present, and future, and a focus on the experiences of colleagues. The diachronic perspective illustrates the range of techniques used to record different phases of writing in different media. The consideration of past, present, and future techniques allows readers to understand and assess why epigraphy and palaeography is or was done in a particular manner by linking the aims of a particular effort with the technique chosen to reach those aims. The choice of techniques is a matter of goals and the records' work circumstances, an inevitable consequence of epigraphy being a double projection: geometrical, transcribing in two dimensions an object that exists physically in three; and mental, an interpretation, with an inevitable selection among the object's defining characteristics. The experiences of colleagues provide a range of perspectives and opinions about issues such as techniques of recording, challenges faced in the field, and ways of reading and interpreting text and image. These accounts are interesting and instructive stories of innovation in the face of scientific conundrum.

The tale of human habitation of the Nile Valley is a long one and includes famine, disaster, global environmental events, and human resolve told against a background of ever-changing landscape. In this volume, Judith Bunbury examines the region over a 10,000 year period, from the Neolithic to the Roman conquest. Charting the progression of the river as it meanders through the region and over the ages, she demonstrates how ancient Egyptians attempted to harness the Nile's power as a force for good. Over the generations, they learned how to farm and build on its banks, and also found innovative solutions to cope in a constantly evolving habitat. Using the latest theories and evidence, this richly illustrated volume also provides a blueprint for the future management of the Nile.

‘Tanbûr Long-Necked Lutes Along the Silk Road and Beyond’ explores the origin, history, construction, and playing techniques of tanbûrs, a musical instrument widely used over vast territories and over many centuries. The diffusion of the tanbûr into the musical cultures along the Silk Road resulted in a variety of tanbûrs with two or more, occasionally doubled or tripled courses, a varying number and variously tuned frets, each having its own characteristic sound, playing technique, and repertory. Since the last century, tanbûrs spread beyond the Silk Road while new versions continue to appear due to changing musical and tonal demands made on them. Similar or identical instruments are also known by other names, such as saz or bağlama, dotâr or dutâr, setâr, dömbra, and dambura.

James Henry Breasted (1865-1935) had a career that epitomizes our popular image of the archaeologist. Daring, handsome, and charismatic, he traveled on expeditions to remote and politically unstable corners of the Middle East, helped identify the tomb of King Tut, and was on the cover of "Tim""e" magazine. But Breasted was more than an Indiana Jones--he was an accomplished scholar, academic entrepreneur, and talented author who brought ancient history to life not just for students but for such notables as Teddy Roosevelt and Sigmund Freud.In "American Egyptologist," Jeffrey Abt weaves together the disparate strands of Breasted's life, from his small-town origins following the Civil War to his evolution into the father of American Egyptology and the founder of the Oriental Institute in the early years of the University of Chicago. Abt explores the scholarly, philanthropic, diplomatic, and religious contexts of his ideas and projects, providing insight into the origins of America's most prominent center for Near Eastern archaeology. An illuminating portrait of the nearly forgotten man who demystified ancient Egypt for the general public, "American Egyptologist" restores James Henry Breasted to the world and puts forward a brilliant case for his place as one of the most important scholars of modern times.

Jan Herman Insinger was a well-known character in the history of Egyptology, mainly because his name has been linked forever with a famous demotic wisdom papyrus now in Leiden. Although he is mentioned by many of his contemporaries, biographical notes on Insinger rarely surpass a few lines and can be quite inaccurate. However, a lot of information can be gathered from the Archives of the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden and other sources, both published and unpublished ones. These documents enable us to sketch a brief biography of this fascinating figure. Former studies by the present author dealt with Insinger's activities as a photographer and a traveller. The present volume focuses on Insinger's activities as an art collector. Insinger can be regarded as a maecenas of the Leiden Museum. Thus, a study of this aspect of his manifold interests is mainly relevant for the information it provides on the growth of the Egyptian treasures in Leiden.

This novel work uses case studies of both familiar and unfamiliar materials, expanding consideration of ancient Egyptian elite culture to encompass lived experience and exploitation of the natural environment.The opening chapter sets out the conceptual ground for the analyses that follow, arguing that the relatively ephemeral activities under investigation were centrally important to the actors. The first and largest study treats human organization of the landscape and its use to create and transmit elite meanings, especially through pictorial and encyclopaedic forms, and to mobilize emotional values. Next, a treatment of the planning of primarily third millennium settlements on the floodplain argues that Egypt offers a partly rural perspective that provides an alternative to the urban focus of many early civilizations but has parallels in elite culture in much of the world. The third study discusses how a single year's events were orchestrated to culminate in a celebratory hunt in which the king, his court, and high officials participated. The concluding chapter presents an initial synthesis of Egyptian treatments of elite experience, drawing in particular upon additional evidence from literary texts and attitudes to travel.

The reign of Tutankhamun was of major significance in the history of ancient Egypt. Following Howard Carter's discovery of the king's tomb in 1922, the story of the boy who became Pharaoh, died young and was buried in splendor at the height of Egyptian civilization captivated generations. But there exists a wide discrepancy between that saga and what scholarship has discovered in the last few decades about Tutankhamun's reign. A truer story is revealed, not by objects from his tomb, but by statuary, reliefs, paintings, and architecture from outside the Valley of the Kings. Marianne Eaton-Krauss, a leading authority on the boy king and the Amarna Period, guides readers through the recent findings of international research and the relevant documentation from a wide variety of sources, to create an accessible and comprehensive biography. Tracing Tutankhamun's life from birth to burial, she analyzes his parentage, his childhood as Prince Tutankhaten, his accession and change of name to Tutankhamun, his role in the restoration of the traditional cults and his own building projects, his death and burial, and the attitudes of his immediate successors to his reign. Illustrated with color and black-and-white images, the book includes extensive endnotes and selected bibliography, which will make it essential reading for students and scholars as well as anyone interested in Tutankhamun.

Manetho's obscure reference to a race of invaders has been a constant source of debate and controversy. But who are these invaders? They are named the 'Hyksos' - a Greek modification of the Egyptian expression HqA xAs.wt 'ruler of foreign lands'. The Hyksos are correlated with the Fifteenth Dynasty of the Second Intermediate Period, a time characterised by the destabilisation and regionalisation of the Egyptian state. Several scholars have pondered over their victory and rule in Egypt, from the manner in which they entered Egypt and the means with which they claimed the throne to their final expulsion from the land. This book assesses their rise to power, exploring the preliminary stages that enabled the Hyksos to gain control over a portion of Egyptian territory and thus to merit a small mention in Manetho's history.

Much of the literature on ancient Egypt centers on pharaohs or on elite conceptions of the afterlife. This scintillating book examines how ordinary ancient Egyptians lived their lives. Drawing on the remarkably rich and detailed archaeological, iconographic, and textual evidence from some 450 years of the New Kingdom, as well as recent theoretical innovations from several fields, it reconstructs private and social life from birth to death. The result is a meaningful portrait composed of individual biographies, communities, and landscapes.

Structured according to the cycles of life, the book relies on categories that the ancient Egyptians themselves used to make sense of their lives. Lynn Meskell gracefully sifts the evidence to reveal Egyptian domestic arrangements, social and family dynamics, sexuality, emotional experience, and attitudes toward the cadences of human life. She discusses how the Egyptians of the New Kingdom constituted and experienced self, kinship, life stages, reproduction, and social organization. And she examines their creation of communities and the material conditions in which they lived. Also included is neglected information on the formation of locality and the construction of gender and sexual identity and new evidence from the mortuary record, including important new data on the burial of children. Throughout, Meskell is careful to highlight differences among ancient Egyptians--the ways, for instance, that ethnicity, marital status, age, gender, and occupation patterned their experiences.

Readers will come away from this book with new insights on how life may have been experienced and conceived of by ancient Egyptians in all their variety. This makes Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt unique in Egyptology and fascinating to read.

Catalog of bronze figures in the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology. The museum houses 510 statuettes or fragments of statuettes made of bronze. Most of them represent Egyptian gods, but there are also Hellenistic and Roman figures.

Notwithstanding the fact that Egyptology is now recognised as a science, an exact and communicable knowledge of whose existence and scope it behoves all modern culture to take cognisance, Manual of Egyptian Archaeology and Guide to the Study of Antiquities in Egypt remains the Handbook of Egyptian Archaeology. For the skilled archaeologist, its pages contain not only new facts, but new views and new interpretations; while to those who know little, or perhaps nothing, of the subjects under discussion, it will open a fresh and fascinating field of study.

There was probably only one past, but there are many different histories. As mental representations of narrow segments of the past, 'histories' reflect different cultural contexts and different historians, although 'history' is a scientific enterprise whenever it processes representative data using rational and controllable methods to work out hypotheses that can be falsified by empirical evidence. A History of Biblical Israel combines experience gained through decades of teaching biblical exegesis and courses on the history of ancient Israel, and of on-going involvement in biblical archaeology. 'Biblical Israel' is understood as a narrative produced primarily in the province of Yehud to forge the collective memory of the elite that operated the temple of Jerusalem under the auspices of the Achaemenid imperial apparatus. The notion of 'Biblical Israel' provides the necessary hindsight to narrate the fate of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah as the pre-history of 'Biblical Israel', since the archives of these kingdoms were only mined in the Persian era to produce the grand biblical narrative.The volume covers the history of 'Biblical Israel' through its fragmentation in the Hellenistic and Roman periods until 136 CE, when four Roman legions crushed the revolt of Simeon Bar-Kosiba.