Uruk: the First City is the first fully historical analysis of the origins of the city and of the state in southern Mesopotamia, the region providing the earliest evidence in world history related to these seminal developments. Contrasting his approach -- which has been influenced by V. Gordan Childe and by Marxist theorywith the neo-evolutionist ideas of (especially) American anthropological theory, the author argues that the innovations that took place during the Uruk period (most of the fourth millennium B.C.) were a true revolution that fundamentally changed all aspects of society and...

Uruk: the First City is the first fully historical analysis of the origins of the city and of the state in southern Mesopotamia, the region providing the earliest evidence in world history related to these seminal developments. Contrasting his approach -- which has been influenced by V. Gordan Childe and by Marxist theorywith the neo-evolutionist ideas of (especially) American anthropological theory, the author argues that the innovations that took place during the Uruk period (most of the fourth millennium B.C.) were a true revolution that fundamentally changed all aspects of society and...

Representations of sexual difference (whether visual or textual) have become an area of much theoretical concern and investigation in recent feminist scholarship. Yet although a wide range of relevant evidence survives from the ancient Near East, it has been exceptional for those studying women in the ancient world to stray outside the traditional bounds of Greece and Rome.
Women of Babylon is a much-needed historical/art historical study that investigates the concepts of femininity which prevailed in Assyro-Babylonian society. Zainab Bahrani's detailed analysis of how the culture...

In the ancient civilizations of the Near East and Mediterranean, images were used as a way to create reality and reach out to the infinite. Reviving the fascination that gripped the avant-garde and the surrealists when confronted with the arts of the ancient Near East, The Infinite Imagepresents a radical new reading of Mesopotamian art as an aesthetic realm defined by objects that transcend time in order to carry traces of the past into the present.
Zainab Bahrani s book opens in the early twentieth century, when artists and intellectuals like Alberto Giacometti, Henry Moore, and...