Ancient Near East

The Material Origin of Numbers examines how number concepts are realized, represented, manipulated, and elaborated. Utilizing the cognitive archaeological framework of Material Engagement Theory and culling data from disciplines including neuroscience, ethnography, linguistics, and archaeology, Overmann offers a methodologically rich study of numbers and number concepts in the ancient Near East from the late Upper Paleolithic Period through the Bronze Age.

Daughter Zion's Trauma offers a new critical reading of the Book of Lamentations through the lens of trauma studies. Through structural analysis and use of the concept of non-referential history as a heuristic lens, Yansen yields fresh insights into the book’s form, language, and larger "historical" significance. Utilizing insights from study of the rhetorical dimensions of the trauma process in cultural trauma, this study asserts that Lamentations strategically adapts certain religious traditions to ensure the survival of those whose voices it echoes.

The history of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study dates back to 1935, and it is the one area of scholarship that has been continuously represented at the Institute ever since. The volume opens with a historical sketch of the study of the Near and Middle East at the Institute. The second part of the volume consists of essays and short studies by IAS scholars, past and present, covering fields such as the ancient Near East and early Islamic history, the Bible and the Qurʾān, Islamic intellectual history within and beyond denominational history, Arabic and other Semitic languages and literatures, Islamic religious and legal practices, law and society, the Islamic West, the Ottoman world, Iranian studies, the modern Middle East, and Islam in the West.

Culture of Defeat is based on a 2017 conference focusing on the impact on, and responses by, the defeated parties in conflicts in the ancient Near East. Shifting the focus of analysis from the conqueror to the vanquished, the (re-)examination of written sources and the archaeological record sheds new light on the consequences and reactions after often traumatic defeats and allows to gain a more nuanced and complete picture of such events.

Aramaic, the language of Jesus of Nazareth, was the lingua franca of the Middle East for over a thousand years before Arabic became widespread. This volume focuses on the Late Antiquity period and how Syriac Christianity emerges from Jewish Aramaic and the course of these two Aramaic traditions. The second part of this volume focuses on the Syriac tradition and its cultural role, the importance of Syriac scholars, and the spread of Syriac Christianity eastward in the first millennium AD. Includes both color and black and white illustrations.

The first ever study in English dedicated to Albania in Late Antiquity to the Medieval period.

King Jehoiachin, the last Judahite king exiled to Babylon, became the focus of conflicting hopes and fears about a revived Davidic kingship after the exile. As Sensenig demonstrates, this conflict stemmed from a drastic oracle from Jeremiah that seemed to categorically reject Jehoiachin, while the canon records that he not only survived but thrived in exile.

Drawn from Akkadian and Sumerian tablets in the Yale Babylonian Collection, many of them previously unpublished, this collection of readings brings to life the vibrancy of ancient Mesopotamian literature, beyond its better-known myths and epics.

Ancient Nubia played key political, social, and economic roles in the ancient world, yet knowledge of Nubian societies remains regrettably narrow, with Nubia often disregarded as derivative of Egypt. This volume provides a timely corrective to this outlook, centering Nubian history and archaeology and presenting research from postcolonial and anti-racist perspectives. In addition to demonstrating Nubiology’s potential impact on Egyptological, classical, and biblical scholarship, this volume offers a new window into African achievements and dominance in the ancient world.

This bundle brings together key texts for those wanting to gain a broad understanding of the history and culture of the Ancient Near East, and includes: Alphabet Scibes in the Land of Cuneiform (By Yigal Bloch), Death and Burial in Iron Age Israel, Aram, and Phoenecia (By Rachel Nabulsi), Calling Out to Isis (By Solange Ashby), Studying the Near and Middle East at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 1935-2018 (Edited by Sabine Schmidtke), A Mesopotamian Miscellany (By Karen Polinger Foster; Translation by Benjamin R. Foster), The Material Origin of Numbers (By Karenleigh A. Overmann). The RRP of the titles in this bundle when sold individually is $916. The bundle saves you $366.40.

A study of the archaeology, history, architecture, sculpture and divinities of the ancient city of Hatra.

Male circumcision is one of the oldest and most widespread rituals, it has been practiced for millennia across many parts of the world. Yet this prevalence and long history do not make circumcision self-evident: it has also long been a topic of reflection, discussion, and controversy and continues to be so today. As the cases in this volume show, already in Antiquity, Greeks, Romans, Jews and Christians clashed over male circumcision. Then as now, concerns about identity, ritual, health, masculinity, and sexuality were a factor in these disputes. Very little is known about actual circumcision practices in the ancient world. Apart from depictions in art, the relation of which to daily practice is difficult to ascertain, we have historical access mainly through texts that reveal how the practice was discursively constructed, and that relate circumcision to wider cultural practices and ideas. This book therefore mainly discusses references to circumcision in literary sources, and the way these relate to other known cultural practices and ideas. These sources date from biblical times and Antiquity and their interpretations in medieval Jewish texts and recent scholarship.