Ash-sharq is a journal devoted to short articles on the archaeology, history and society of the Ancient Near East. Contents of Vol 3 No 1 2019: Unequal in Life but Equal in Death? The Mortuary Evidence for Social Stratification in the Ubaid Polities – by Konstantinos Kopanias and Giota Barlagianni; Tell Shemshara 2018: Emerging and Floating Evidence – by J. Eidem, M. Merlino, E. Mariotti and R. Kalim Salih; Investigating Late Chalcolithic Period settlement on the Marivan Plain, western Iran. First insights from the Marivan Plain Survey project – by Morteza Zamani Dadane, Sirvan Mohammadi Ghasrian and Tim Boaz Bruun Skuldbøl; Animals in War in Historical Mesopotamia – by Laura Battini; Luxuries Lost: Wood and Other Ligneous Materials for Interior and Architectural Decoration in Ancient Mesopotamia (Chalcolithic and Bronze Age) – by Philippe Quenet; Temple of Amrith / The Fifth Field Season of Archaeological Excavations in 1960 `Field Written Notes’ by Nassib Saliby – by Michel Al-Maqdissi and Eva Ishaq; A Preliminary Analysis of the Toponymy in and around the So-Called Jerusalem Corridor – by Ran Zadok

No Place Like Home: Ancient Near Eastern Houses and Households had its genesis in a series of six popular and well-attended ASOR conference sessions on Household Archaeology in the Ancient Near East. A selection of papers are presented here, together with four invited contributions. The 18 chapters are organized in three thematic sections. Chapters in the first, Architecture as Archive of Social Space, profile houses as records of the lives of inhabitants, changing and adapting with residents; many offer a background focus on how human behavior is shaped by the walls of one’s own home. This section also includes innovative approaches to understanding who dwelled in these homes. For instances, one chapter explores evidence for children in a house, another surveys what it was like to live in a military barracks. The middle section, The Active Household, focuses on the evidence for how residents carried out household activities including work and food preparation. Chapters include the ‘heart of household archaeology’ in their application of activity area research, but also drill down to the social significance of what residents were doing or eating, and where such actions were taking place. The final section, Ritual Space at Home, features studies on the house as ritual space. The entire complement of chapters provides the latest research on houses and households spanning the Chalcolithic to the Roman periods and from Turkey to Egypt.

Image and Identity in the Ancient Near East: Papers in memoriam Pierre Amiet gathers the papers of two colloquia – one held in Pierre Amiet’s honour in Lyon in 2016 and the other held in Paris in 2017, as well as articles by colleagues who wished to dedicate a final tribute to him. The volume consists of two parts. The studies in the first part analyse the body as a biological entity as well as a social, sexual and cultural identity (persona). They show the emotional power of images, the means and media used to achieve this suggestive power, and the different audiences that are the privileged recipients of the different types of production. They also investigate the emotions as they are expressed through the gestures and attitudes of the characters represented. The second part includes articles that are more closely related to the themes that Pierre Amiet has tackled. Two articles deal with his favourite research theme, glyptics. One article takes up the problem of the formation of the state which Pierre Amiet had dealt with in several of his glyptic studies. Other papers are concerned with the organisation of craftsmen and statuary.

This volume is a tribute to the career of Professor Olivier Rouault who has conducted extensive research in the fields of both Assyriology and Ancient Near Eastern archaeology. The book is composed of 25 papers written by his colleagues, friends and former students from Belgium, France, Great Britain, Italy, Israel, Japan, The Netherlands, Poland, Syria and the United States. The contributions presented here combine archaeological, iconographic and Assyriological studies from the Neolithic to the 1st millennium BC, covering whole of Mesopotamia and regions of Anatolia and the Levant. Nine papers deal with the data of Terqa, Mari and Qasr Shemamok, sites close to Professor Olivier Rouault's main field of research. He published cuneiform tablets from Mari and Terqa and worked as a director of archaeological missions at Terqa and Qasr Shemamok. The book is divided into six main topics: Palace and Administration, Temples and Cults, Families and Societies, Literatures and Historiography, Representation and Symbolic Aspects, Cultural Markers and Stratigraphy - all the topics that attracted Professor Olivier Rouault during his fruitful career. More intimate texts recounting memories of moments shared with Olivier punctuate the reading of these contributions.

Oxbow says: These nine essays, taken from the Acts of the International Colloquium held at the Maison de l'Orient et de la Mediterranee at Lyon in 2002, examine the subject of medicine and doctors in the texts of the ancient Near East. Subjects include images of birth in Mesopotamia, the human body and sexuality in Babylonian medical texts, skeletal markers of task activities in the Iron Age human remains from Tell Mishrife in central Syria, the treatment of illness in Babylonia, the digestion of food, palaeopathological approaches, healers at the Neo-Assyrian court, and the vocabulary used to describe the dead.

Ash-sharq is a journal devoted to short articles on the archaeology, history and society of the Ancient Near East.

Ash-sharq is a journal devoted to short articles on the archaeology, history and society of the Ancient Near East.

This book brings together the main discussions that took place at an international conference on the iconology of war in the ancient Near East, a subject never addressed at an international meeting before. The articles span the 3rd to the 1st millennium, with a special stress on the Neo-Assyrian period. They try to respond to many questions about representations of war: what is 'warrior' iconography and on what basis it can be defined? Did the war scenes follow a specific directory whereby they adopted the most varied forms? Can we determine the most usual conditions for the creation of pictures of wartime (such as periods of great change)? Were the war scenes referring to specific historical events or were they generic representations? What can a society accept from the representations of war? What did war images silence and why? What is a 'just' punishment for enemies and thus the 'just' representation of it? Who has control of the representation and therefore also the memory of war? Who is the real subject of war representations? What emerges from all the articles published here is the relevance of textual data in any analysis of iconological material. And this is not only true for iconology, but for all the archaeological material discovered at historical sites.