Kategoria BISAC: History >> Ancient - General

Works on Old Testament historiography, the 'Conquest', and the origins of ancient Israel have burgeoned in recent days. But while others have been issuing new reconstructions this novel work presents a close reading of the biblical text. The focus is on the literary techniques that ancient writers employed in narrating stories of conquest, and the aim is to pinpoint their communicative intentions in their own contexts. This reading is enhanced by engagement with the important discipline of the philosophy of history. Ancient Conquest accounts, replete with extensive quotations from...

This is a volume of tributes and essays in memory of Gsta W. Ahlstrm, Professor of Old Testament in the Divinity School and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department of the University of Chicago. Nineteen essays written by former students and colleagues deal with the history and archaeology of Iron Age Palestine and the ancient Near East, the Deuteronomistic History, and the history of Old Testament studies. Six tributes read at his memorial service, his final bibliography and a list of the dissertations he chaired combine to yield a montage of the scholar as teacher, character,...

This work is a cross-disciplinary study of Israel's first 'capital city' from topographical, archaeological, historical, and literary perspectives. Challenging William F. Albright's claim that the ancient city is to be identified with Tell el-Ful, the book develops the case for a location instead at modern Jeba, 9 km north-east of Jerusalem, a site-change that bears important consequences for several scholarly theories relating to Gibeah. Among these are the inquest into the historicity and literary composition of the story of the 'Outrage of Gibeah' (Judg. 19-21) and the origins and...

Lying now under the sand 300 kilometres south of the coastal metropolis of Alexandria, the town of Oxyrhynchus rose to prominence under Egypt's Hellenistic and Roman rulers. The 1895 British-led excavation revealed little in the way of buildings and other cultural artefacts, but instead yielded a huge random mass of everyday papyri, piled thirty feet deep, including private letters and shopping lists, government circulars, and copies of ancient literature.

The surviving bookrolls - the papyrus rolls with literary texts - have provided a great deal of information on ancient books,...

The origin and growth of cities in antiquity. The origin and growth of cities forms one of the most important chapters in human history. In this volume, 17 researchers present archaeological, epigraphic and textual data on the rise of urbanism in the ancient Near Eastern world, Cyprus to Mesopotamia and from Crete to Egypt. Topics addressed include the influence of agriculture intensification, of trade, of craft specialization and of writing on the rise of cities. The roles of cultural elites, of ideologies and of relations between proximal urban centres are also examined. The contributors...

This investigation consists of updates to the chronology of Achaemenid Persia (539 BCE-304 BCE). The state of Achaemenid chronology was the subject of a series of studies published by this writer about ten to fifteen years ago. Newly emerged evidence has necessitated the present updates. Errata in those earlier studies are listed in an appendix. The focus of the present investigation is on what is new. A comprehensive statement on Achaemenid chronology that progresses from first principles and combines all that is new with all that is old remains desirable. Few historical events are as...

Why did the Greeks excel in geometry, but lag begin the Mesopotamians in arithmetic? How were the great pyramids of Egypt and the Han tombs in China constructed? What did the complex system of canals and dykes in the Tigris and Euphrates river valley have to do with the deforestation of Lebanon's famed cedar forests? This work presents a cross-cultural comparison of the ways in which the ancients learned about and preserved their knowledge of the natural world, and the ways in which they developed technologies that enabled them to adapt to and shape their surroundings. Covering the major...

Proceedings of the International Conference October 2000, Taman, Russia.

28 papers from an international conference held in Taman, Russia, in 2000.