Ancient Near Eastern History

In: A. Baruchi-Unna et al. (eds.), “Now It Happened in Those Days”: Studies in Biblical, Assyrian, and Other Ancient Near Eastern Historiography Presented to Mordechai Cogan on His 75th Birthday (Winona Lake, In.: Eisenbrauns, 2017), pp. 493-523

An enormous amount of research and the synthesization of historical events and archaeological artifacts has led the author to verify Israelite residence in Egypt from 1876–1446 BC. This research is connected to the unexpected discovery of interconnecting archaeological, epigraphical, and iconographical evidence that attests to the presence of Israelites in Egypt over virtually the entire 430 years. By the sheer volume of verifiable evidence of complementary historical data—when comparing the biblical text and the artifactual and epigraphical record—the author attempts to demonstrate convincingly to objective readers that the biblical story of the Egyptian origins of the Israelite ‘nation’ is reliable as a factual account. Never again will students of the Bible have to listen to uniformed university professors denounce the story of Israelites in Egypt without a ready defense for its validity.

For about 150 years, scholars have attempted to identify the language of the world’s first alphabetic script, and to translate some of the inscriptions that use it. Until now, their attempts have accomplished little more than identifying most of the pictographic letters and translating a few of the Semitic words. With the publication of The World’s Oldest Alphabet, a new day has dawned. All of the disputed letters have been resolved, while the language has been identified conclusively as Hebrew, allowing for the translation of 16 inscriptions that date from 1842–1446 BC. These inscriptions expressly name 3 biblical figures and greatly illuminate the earliest Israelite history in a way that no other book has achieved, apart from the Bible.

In this book, Claudia Glatz reconsiders the concept of empire and the processes of imperial making and undoing by investigating the practices, places, and things and their evolving interconnections with people, that together produce, challenge, and, above all, continuously transform imperial networks and their constituent communities. The volume provides a new, critical account of the Hittite imperial network of Late Bronze Age Anatolia (c. 1600-1180 BCE), one of the earliest archaeologically well-attested imperialist polities of the ancient Near East, through detailed analyses of a wide range of archaeological, iconographic, and textual sources. Concerned with the analysis and communication of the complexity, messiness, and ever transforming nature of imperial relationships, the book examines the practices through which Hittite elites and administrators hoped to bind together disparate communities and achieve a measure of sovereignty in particular places and landscapes, and with the help of particular material things. It also tracks the ambiguities inherent in these practices, their messy results, their un- and under-achievements, and how they were resisted, or more subtly negotiated in different regional and cultural contexts.

All three of my books--Nimrod the Empire Builder: Architect of Shock and Awe (Ancient World Publishing 2023), Origins of the Hebrews: New Evidence for Israelites in Egypt from Joseph to the Exodus (New Creation 2021), and The World's Oldest Alphabet: Hebrew as the Language of the Proto-Consonantal Script (Carta 2016)--are available to purchase. Inside the uploaded document, I have instructions for purchasing any one of them.

NB: These are the second proofs, which differ from the published versions in small details (mainly typos). -- This paper deals with the “Lost Tribes of Israel,” the people removed by the Assyrian authorities from the territories of the conquered kingdom of Israel and especially its capital city Samaria (Assyrian Samerina), to be resettled elsewhere in the Empire’s vast holdings.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/716031

Babylonian hermeneutics has been the subject of several studies in recent years that have showed that speculative thought exploited the potentiality of the cuneiform system through analogical reasoning in order to find and create new meanings according to phonetic, semantic and graphic similarities. Analogical hermeneutics was prompted by the polysemic and homophonic nature of cuneiform writing and was intended as an inquiry into the cuneiform system itself. Analogical reasoning is also well known in ancient Greece particularly in Heraclitus producing semantic proliferation and ambiguity. A comparison between Mesopotamian and Greek sources shows that Heraclitus’ fragments share with cuneiform scholarship a similar epistemic reasoning based on analogy. The present contribution aims at setting the Babylonian epistemological system in light of Heraclitus' philosophy.

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the phenomenon frequently called the “Ubaid expansion” or “Ubaid interaction sphere” in which the material culture of Southern Mesopotamia appears in Upper Mesopotamia and the bordering mountains during the 6th-5th millennium. The paper will also attempt to explain how did the “Ubaid expansion” contribute to the formation of hierarchical societies in Greater Mesopotamia. Indeed, the biggest weakness of the model of expansion (drawn from the subsequent “Uruk expansion”) is that it ignores multiregional character of the Ubaid interaction sphere and describes the culture contact between south and north Mesopotamia as a core-periphery dichotomy. Uruk expansion was probably an actual colonial phenomenon, but it is difficult to use the same argument to explain the “Ubaid expansion”. Several arguments (exchange, colonization, emulation and technology transfer) have been proposed for the widespread dissemination of Ubaid material culture in Upper Mesopotamia. The present paper proposes to outline and discuss these competing arguments in the hope of contributing to the early complex societies literature and to answer how and why the Ubaid expansion emerged.

Dynastic connections in the Arsacid Empire and the origins of the House of Sāsān, in: The Parthian and Early Sasanian Empires: Adaptation and expansion, Editors: Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis; Elizabeth Pendleton; Touraj Daryaee; Michael Alram, Oxford and Philadelphia: Oxbow, 2016, 23-35.

See http://www.oxbowbooks.com/oxbow/the-parthian-and-early-sassanian-empires.html [Published by the British Institute of Persian Studies (BIPS) Archaeological Monographs Series]

ABSTRACT
The old rivalry between branches of the Parthian royal house
and clans, including the Younger (western) Arsacids, the
Gondopharids in Indo-Parthia, the Sūrēn and Kārin, revived
when a rebellion broke out in Persis under the leadership
of Ardashir I, son of the Gondopharid prince Sāsān. The
connections between the Gondopharids of Sakastan and
the Sūrēn with Persis under Ardashir eventually led to the
overthrow of the Younger Arsacids.
A comparison of the diverse traditions about Sāsān shows
that the Persian writings and Sasanian inscriptions were
manipulated for specific political reasons. The Shahnameh
tradition traces Sāsān’s ancestry to the late Kayanids, harking
back to the historical Achaemenids. The same tradition
suggests that the ancestral seat of Sāsān’s forebears was in
India, where they had fled in fear of Alexander. Sāsān was
in fact a member of the Arsacid Gondopharid line, the ruling
dynasty of Indo-Parthia, who reigned in Afghanistan and the
north-western regions of India. Even under Farn-Sāsān they
held Sakastan, Arachosia and probably part of Sind.
Most probably Sāsān was the father of Ardashir, as
indicated by the Shahnameh, Agathias and the Armenian
authors, and as implied by Narseh’s inscription at Paikuli.
The coins and inscriptions of Ardashir I and Shapur I say
Ardashir I was the son of Pābag. Tabari, Kārnāmāg and
Bundahishn give a version that Ardashir’s father was Pābag,
but include Sāsān in the genealogy.
For reasons of propaganda Ardashir I, and later Shapur I,
endeavoured to downplay Sāsān’s role, so as not to be
perceived in Persis/Fars as a foreign dynasty. The paradox
is that, assuming Sāsān was Ardashir’s father, the Sasanian
dynasty in fact had a Parthian, and perhaps even an Arsacid
ancestry. Moreover, the early Sasanians built up their empire
thanks to the support of the chief clans of Parthia including
the Sūrēn and Kārin. That is why the Sasanian Ērānšahr
has been referred to as “the empire of the Persians and
Parthians”. And that is why Ammianus perceived the royal
house of Persia as the Arsacids.

A Critical Research Involving the form and Content of Hittite Treaties and its similarities as Archaeological Evidence for the Structures Found in Biblical Covenants throughout the Old Testament.  The Influence of Pagan Legality which influenced Hebrew Religious Culture as demonstrated in Old Testament Studies.

Third-millennium Mesopotamia has provided an impressive quantity of sources for the study of ancient slavery, among them a collection of standards (the so-called Laws of Ur-Namma). Despite the volume of documents, Mesopotamian slavery remains elusive in its general traits. This is partly due to the nature of the sources, but also to the approaches and interpretations of modern scholars. Slavery in ancient Mesopotamia has been the focus of several studies in the 1960s and 1970s that interpreted the sources using comparative approaches and Marxist analyses. Since then, the topic has seldom been revisited. In this article, I present the status quaestionis with an overview of the available sources and related studies, together with a sketch of the different types of bonded and forced labor in the Neo-Sumerian period (21st cent. bce).

After entering the second millennium BCE as a military superpower, Elam faded into historical obscurity upon its withdrawal from the broader Near Eastern political scene in 1763 BCE and only reemerged much later as a major player with a sequence of incursions in Mesopotamia beginning in the thirteenth century and culminating in the 1155 BCE fall of the Kassites. During the intervening centuries, neither written nor archaeological sources offer clear signs that Elamite territory had come under the authority of any foreign power. Here the authors propose that a reexamination of evidence from the ancient settlement of Kabnak (modern Haft Tepe), approximately seventeen kilometers southeast of the Elamite lowland capital of Susa, discloses a mid-fifteenth to mid-fourteenth century BCE state-controlled arsenal of war chariots and weaponry that may hold a key to comprehending Elam's apparent continued resistance to outside forces and its rise as a military superpower in the thirteenth century.

Until 1993 there were conducted first excavations in what promised to be the site of one of the most important buildings of Petra, the stunning capital of the Nabataean kingdom. Its construction, whose initiation century BC, several changes, reconstructions and landslides along its more than five hundred years of operation. But despite this still unknown for certain functions for which it was designed and that, regardless of the construction elements, materials have been located just still less inscriptions that shed some light on a mystery that will try here exhibit various theories that enable closer to resolution.

For international relations (IR) scholars, the story behind the figure of Udjahorresnet might seem as an obscure phase in international history. Yet the pre-Roman period is educative for testing constitutive IR
concepts such as the balance of power theory, international system, or soft power, which are still widely assumed to have become relevant only in the post-Roman context rather than in the ancient civilizations of
the Eastern Mediterranean preceding the Greco-Roman experience. This article proposes that insights from IR theory can offer ancient historians and Egyptologists theoretical tools by linking empirical facts to patterns
rather than just unique events via conceptual analysis. Udjahorresnet as diplomatic figure is an important primary source to understand the transition of power from native Egyptian hands to the Achaemenid rule,
and thus it provides a case study where micro and macro levels of analyses find fertile ground in a cross-disciplinary framework.

PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:

"This volume presents the outcomes of the European Science Foundation workshop “Sea Peoples” Up-to-Date. New Research on Transformations in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 13th–11th Centuries BCE, which took place in November 2014 at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. It offers up-to-date research on the Sea Peoples phenomenon during the so called “crisis years” at the end of the Bronze Age. This period encompasses dramatic changes in the political and cultural landscape of mainly the Eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BCE and most of the 12th century BCE. In geographical terms, these changes are noticeable in a vast area stretching from the Italian peninsula over the Balkans, the Aegean, Anatolia and Cyprus, to the Levant and Egypt.

The term “Sea Peoples phenomenon” should be considered as an encompassing term, which – in addition to the written records on hostile activities of various ethnic groups in the Eastern Mediterranean – is synonymous with the effect of this turbulent period as reflected in the material remains. As a consequence, these events ended the Late Bronze Age, the first period of “internationalism” in human history. The papers are presented in five sections: “Overviews: From Italy to the Levant”; “Climate and Radiocarbon”; “Theoretical Approaches on Destruction, Migration and Transformation of Cultures”; “Case Studies: Cyprus, Cilicia and the Northern and Southern Levant”; and “Material Studies”.

The reader of this volume gains insights into very complex changes during this period. It will become clear that these changes manifest themselves over decades and not years, and include numerous underlying factors: One single wave of migration, one general military campaign and other simple explanations should be dismissed. The breakdown of Late Bronze Age societies and the transformative processes that followed in its wake occurred in a vast area but they are mirrored in differing ways at local levels."

This study examines a little-known case of Enlightenment knowledge transmission centred on the rock-cut monument of Darius I at Bīsotūn in western Iran. It discusses a report on the monument published by the cartographer and historian Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville, which originated with the Decalced Carmelite monk Emmanuel de Saint-Albert (born Jean-Claude Ballyet); who transmitted it to Isaac Bellet, a doctor involved in secret negotiations in Constantinople; who in turn sent it to Louis, Duke d'Orléans, in Paris; who passed it on to d'Anville. The collison of scholarly interest, political service and scientific personality offers a fascinating case study of the Enlightenment 'republic of letters' in action.

Uruk, Auruk or Warka was an ancient city of Sumer (and later of Babylonia) situated east of the present bed of the Euphrates River on the dried-up ancient channel of the Euphrates 30 km (19 mi) east of modern Samawah, Al-Muthannā, Iraq.

Uruk is the type site for the Uruk period. Uruk played a leading role in the early urbanization of Sumer in the mid-4th millennium BC. By the final phase of the Uruk period around 3100 BCE, the city may have had 40,000 residents, with 80,000-90,000 people living in its environs, making it the largest urban area in the world at the time. The legendary king Gilgamesh, according to the chronology presented in the Sumerian king list, ruled Uruk in the 27th century BC. The city lost its prime importance around 2000 BC in the context of the struggle of Babylonia against Elam, but it remained inhabited throughout the Seleucid (312–63 BC) and Parthian (227 BC to 224 AD) periods until it was finally abandoned shortly before or after the Islamic conquest of 633–638.

William Kennett Loftus visited the site of Uruk in 1849, identifying it as "Erech", known as "the second city of Nimrod", and led the first excavations from 1850 to 1854.

The Arabic name of Babylonia, which eventually became the name of the present-day country, al-ʿIrāq, is thought to derive from the name Uruk via Aramaic (Erech) and possibly via Middle Persian (Erāq) transmission.
In Sumerian, the word uru could mean "city, town, village, district, circular area"