Qasr Ibrim’s last land sale, AD 1463 (EA 90225) (original) (raw)
Related papers
2014
At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century tablets from chance finds at Yorġān Tepe (Nuzi) and Kirkūk (Arrapḫa) prior to the first excavations at Nuzi in 1925 entered the tablet collections of various museums all over the world. More than 360 of such Nuzi tablets, dating roughly from the mid 15th to the mid 14th century BCE, have been acquired by the British Museum (henceforth BM) in several individual purchases. Three more Nuzi tablets have now been identified at the Museum and are presented here. One is a list of household personnel (BM 86005), mostly female, receiving wool allotments, and includes some previously unattested Hurrian female personal names. Two are fragments of legal documents, one from the lower right (BM 95280) and the other from the reverse (BM 95463) of their respective tablets. They bear seal impressions and the names of the witnesses sealing the contracts. A letter (BM 103203) is also presented here. It shows both typical Nuzi features (the addressee has a Hurrian name) and Middle Assyrian characteristics. Most importantly, it is dated according to Assyrian custom with a līmu, but one that could be either an unusual writing (the scribe may have had a Hurrian background) of a known līmu from the reign of Aššuruballiṭ I (Kidin-kūbe), or a new līmu dating to the 14th century BCE (Kitte-kūbe or Qītī-kūbe).
Gnomon (München), 2021
The benefits of the CIIP project for the scholarly community are obvious and enormous and the team merits the admiration and thanks of all those with any interest in ancient Judaea/Palestine, both for the quality and the speed of their common work. By this point the series has already established itself as a reference and no further comment is required by way of introduction. Volume IV covers a geographical region of very special interest, over a period of extraordinary change: from Alexander to Muhammad. While the wise decision was made to devote a separate (2-part) volume to Jerusalem itself, Judaea and Idumaea represent the real heart of the territory explored in the CIIP. The distinctive and decisive social and religious history broadly binding the 172 locations handled in this volume-from tiny sites, quite off the map, to important centers like Hebron, Bethlehem, and Beit Guvrin-lends particular promise for further study of the multitude of micro-histories catalogued here. In various ways, the successive, intricate processes of Hellenization, Romanization, and Christianization are all detectable in the corpus, right up the moment of the Muslim Conquest. A vast deposit of information is naturally included in the 1580 concentrated pages and more than 1300 inscriptions (#2649-3978) comprising Parts 1 and 2. The format is like that followed in the other volumes, and no general historical and archeological introduction is offered at the beginning of the volume. This lack of a synthetic orientation, of course, reflects the challenging nature of the contents, which, besides the chronological and geographical diversity typical also of other similar collections (e.g. CIL, IG), is also unusually linguistically diverse, so that an adequate conspectus is simply very difficult to gain. The bigger sites are, nevertheless, given separate introductions proportioned to their importance; and obviously the true core of the publication is the assemblage and decipherment of the specific artifacts. Here the familiar presentation is attractive, compact, and complete. Each individual entry includes a brief description, including the findspot (when known), a transcription, translation, short (or sometimes rather developed) commentary, and a focused bibliography. Nearly always, photographs or drawings are also provided. A 60-page Index of Personal Names (cumulative with the earlier volumes) along with three maps and a key to the named locations is included at the back of Part 2. An additional index of foreign words and phrases would have been a large undertaking (not made easier by the multiple languages involved), but an
Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia Contents
Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia, 2021
The cultures of Nubia built the earliest cities, states, and empires of inner Africa, but they remain relatively poorly known outside their modern descendants and the com-munity of archaeologists, historians, and art historians researching them. e earliest archaeological work in Nubia was motivated by its role as neighbor, trade partner, and enemy of ancient Egypt. Increasingly, however, ancient Nile-based Nubian cultures are recognized in their own right as the earliest complex societies in inner Africa. As agro-pastoral cultures, Nubian settlement, economy, political organization, and religious ideologies were organized differently from those of the urban, bureaucratic, and overwhelmingly agricultural states of Egypt and the ancient Middle East. Nubian societies are thus of great interest in comparative study, and are also recognized for their broader impact on histories of the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, as well as of neighboring areas. Although the archaeology and history of Nubia remains incompletely known, the pace of research on Nubia has increased significantly in the last fifteen years. It is partly because of new dam construction and resulting salvage excavation, partly because other areas of the Middle East and North Africa have become less accessible to research, and partly because of generous funding from the Qatar-Sudan Archaeological Project for about forty archaeological projects in Sudan from 2014 to 2020. The most recent survey of ancient and medieval Nubia—David Edwards’s The Nubian Past (2004)—remains a thought-provoking and insightful overview, but does not take account of more recent research. This volume therefore gathers new research and analytical perspectives on these cultures in the hope that it will make them more accessible to scholars and the broader public. Edited by Emberling and Williams