The first ideas for the symposium were generated in Brussels in the summer of 1986, dur- ing exquisite lunches in between HST proposal consortium meetings. At the time it was expected that soon after the previous IAU symposium (No. 116) devoted to luminous hot massive stars, a bonanza of new exciting observational material would become available, together with significant advances on the theoretical front. Also it was felt that Wolf- Rayet stars should feature predominantly, because that had not been the case since IAU Symposium No. 99 in 1981. Tradition requires that IAU symposia on hot...

This volume deals with the religious practices of the family in the ancient Babylonian, Syrian, and Israelite civilizations. On the basis of a wealth of documents from both the private and the literary realm, the book gives an exhaustive description and analysis of the rites of the ancestor cult and the devotion to local gods. The author demonstrates the role of these two aspects of family religion in the identity construction of its followers. The section dealing with Israel pays particular attention to the relationship between family religion and state religion. The emergence of the state...

This volume, edited by Tzvi Zbusch and Karel van der Toorn, contains the papers delivered at the first international conference on Mesopotamian magic held under the auspices of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) in June 1995. It is the first collective volume dedicated to the study of this topic. It aims at serving as a bench-mark and provides analytic and innovative but also sythetic and programmatic essays. Magical texts, forms, and traditions from the Mesopotamian cultural worlds of the third millennium BCE through the first millennium CE, in the Sumerian, Akkadian and...

The first ideas for the symposium were generated in Brussels in the summer of 1986, dur- ing exquisite lunches in between HST proposal consortium meetings. At the time it was expected that soon after the previous IAU symposium (No. 116) devoted to luminous hot massive stars, a bonanza of new exciting observational material would become available, together with significant advances on the theoretical front. Also it was felt that Wolf- Rayet stars should feature predominantly, because that had not been the case since IAU Symposium No. 99 in 1981. Tradition requires that IAU symposia on hot...

In this symposium on Wolf-Rayet stars, binary aspects received ample attention, notably because of the recognition that many observations of spectral and photometric variability at all accessible wavelengths are related to colliding winds or other forms of wind interaction.

The successful launch on November 17, 1995 of ESA's Infrared Space Observatory (ISO) by means of an Ariane 4 carrier, has set in motion a true revolution in quantitative infrared astronomy. For the first time since the very successful IRAS mission in 1983, the astronomical community has uninterrupted access to the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The four focal plane instruments on board of ISO ( the camera ISOCAM, the photometerjcamera ISOPHOT, and the short and long wavelength spec trographs ISO-SWS and ISO-LWS), perform very well and live up to the high expectations all of us...