A mummy unwrapping party marked the launch of a mentoring partnership between the Egyptology-Ancient West Asian Studies Department Undergraduate Group and the Egyptology department’s graduate students Thursday night.
Berossos was a priest and historian from Babylon. A contemporary of Alexander the Great and the first Seleucid kings, he wrote a history of the world in Greek and for a Greek audience, but articulating his Babylonian perspective: he told Greek conquerors about the culture they had conquered. The Babyloniaca, as the work was probably called, was influential through the ages: in antiquity, it was quoted directly or indirectly by such diverse thinkers as Alexander Polyhistor and Eusebius. The text was lost in the middle ages but continued to be read in fragments and paraphrases. When the fragments were reassembled (and indeed forged) in the Renaissance, Berossos found himself at the heart of crucial debates about authenticity, scholarship and the shape of divine and human history.
This edited volume, the first ever devoted to Berossos and his work, brings together leading scholars from a range of academic disciplines, including Classics, Assyriology, Iranology, Ancient History, Patristics, the History of Science and Renaissance Studies, to reassess the life, work and reception of one of the most fascinating and elusive figures in antiquity. The picture which emerges speaks powerfully of the enduring links between the classical world and the Ancient Near East; links which have profoundly shaped the development of European literature, culture and thought.
In Bodies of Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia (Ancient Magic and Divination 9, Leiden: Brill, 2013) Matthew Rutz explores the relationship between ancient collections of texts, commonly deemed libraries and archives, and the modern interpretation of titles like ‘diviner’. By looking at cuneiform tablets as artifacts with archaeological contexts, this work probes the modern analytical categories used to study ancient diviners and investigates the transmission of Babylonian/Assyrian scholarship in Syria. During the Late Bronze Age diviners acted as high-ranking scribes and cultic functionaries in Emar, a town on the Syrian Euphrates (ca. 1375-1175 BCE). This book’s centerpiece is an extensive analytical catalogue of the excavated tablet collection of one family of diviners. Over seventy-five fragments are identified for the first time, along with many proposed joins between fragments.
This book investigates the founding and building of cities in the ancient Near East. The creation of new cities was imagined as an ideological project or a divine intervention in the political narratives and mythologies of Near Eastern cultures, often masking the complex processes behind the social production of urban space. During the Early Iron Age (ca. 1200–850 BCE), Assyrian and Syro-Hittite rulers developed a highly performative official discourse that revolved around constructing cities, cultivating landscapes, building watercourses, erecting monuments, and initiating public festivals. This volume combs through archaeological, epigraphic, visual, architectural, and environmental evidence to tell the story of a region from the perspective of its spatial practices, landscape history, and architectural technologies. It argues that the cultural processes of the making of urban spaces shape collective memory and identity as well as sites of political performance and state spectacle.
The Mellon workshop, established by a grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, is awarded to graduate students in the Humanities. Typically Brown awards only five graduate workshops each year. The workshop is intended to both provide a means by which to facilitate dissertation completion and to foster communication across disciplines within the academy.
New book on the lunar calendar co-edited by John Steele published.
This collection of papers explores the way cultures have dealt with the vagaries of a lunar calendar on everyday life. The volume, co-edited by John Steele, includes contributions by Steele and the department's Leo Depuydt.
Congratulations to Professor Laurel Bestock for receiving a Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship Award at the Sheridan Center University Awards Ceremony on May 7th, 2012. Katherine Bergeron, Dean of the College, presented the award. The Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship is awarded each year to regular untenured members of the faculty (assistant professors and lecturers) who have achieved a record of excellence in teaching and scholarship during their first years at Brown. The winner, chosen by a faculty committee, is granted one semester of leave on special assignment.
The department is delighted to announce that Kathryn Howley, a third-year PhD student in Egyptology, has been awarded this year's Best Student Paper Award at the annual conference of the American Research Center in Egypt for her paper "A Reexamination of Early 'Sed Festival' Representations". Congratulations, Kathryn, on this prestigious and well-deserved award!
Assyriology graduate students, Willis Monroe and Zack Wainer, recently translated a song by the The Dirty Projectors "The gun has no trigger" into Akkadian. Willis wrote out the cuneiform using an Old-Babylonian lapidary script. The website for the single is dirtyprojectors.net.
Professor Laurel Bestock leaves for Sudan to begin a new Brown project at the site of Uronarti. Uronarti is a currently uninhabited island in the Nile in northern Sudan, where the 12th Dynasty Egyptian kings built one of a string of monumental fortresses.
Springer Publications announces a new book by John M. Steele Ancient Astrononomical Observations and the Study of the Moon's Motion (1691-1757)
John M. Steele tells the story of how the secular acceleration of the moon was discovered, the reception of its discovery, and the first attempts to determine its size of the acceleration from historical data. Additionally, this study addresses the wider question of how ancient and medieval astronomy was viewed in the eighteenth century; particularly European perceptions of ancient Greek, Arabic, Babylonian, and Chinese astronomy.
Follow the archaeological excavations at Ziyaret Tepe, the Assyrian city of Tushhan, in southeastern Turkey with daily updates on the latest discoveries, journal entries from the excavators and scientific specialists, and a candid snapshot of life on a real dig in the modern Middle East.