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The Sealand kingdom arose from the rebellion against Babylonian hegemony in the latter half of the 18th century BCE., forcing it to share power over Sumer and Akkad. Although its kings maintained themselves throughout the turmoil leading to the demise of the Amorite dynasty at Babylon, it remains one of the most poorly documented Mesopotamian polities. Until recently, it was known to us mainly through its inclusion into later king lists and chronicles, but the recent publication of well over 400 archival texts from a Sealand palace, soon followed by literary and divinatory tablets, finally makes it possible to study this polity from primary sources. This book proposes a history of the Sealand kingdom based on the new evidence and a reevaluation of previously known sources. The aspects examined are: the economy — mainly the palatial administration and transformation of agricultural and animal resources; the panthea and the palace-sponsored cult, which show that Sealand I kings may have positioned their rule in a Larsean tradition; the political history, including a discussion of the geography and the relative chronology; the recording and transmission of knowledge on the Sealand I dynasty in Mesopotamian historiography.

Women in the Ancient Near East offers a lucid account of the daily life of women in Mesopotamia from the third millennium BCE until the beginning of the Hellenistic period. The book systematically presents the lives of women emerging from the available cuneiform material and discusses modern scholarly opinion. Stol’s book is the first full-scale treatment of the history of women in the Ancient Near East.

These essays represent a summation of Piotr Steinkeller's decades-long thinking and writing about the history of third millennium BCE Babylonia and the ways in which it is reflected in ancient historical and literary sources and art, as well as of how these written and visual materials may be used by the modern historian to attain, if not a reliable record of histoire événementielle, a comprehensive picture of how the ancients understood their history. The book focuses on the history of early Babylonian kingship, as it evolved over a period from Late Uruk down to Old Babylonian times, and the impact of the concepts of kingship on contemporaneous history writing and visual art. Here comparisons are drawn between Babylonia and similar developments in ancient Egypt, China and Mesoamerica. Other issues treated is the intersection between history writing and the scholarly, lexical, and literary traditions in early Babylonia; and the question of how the modern historian should approach the study of ancient sources of \"historical\" nature. Such a broad and comprehensive overview is novel in Mesopotamian studies to date. As such, it should contribute to an improved and more nuanced understanding of early Babylonian history.

Economic history is well documented in Assyriology, thanks to the preservation of dozens of thousands of clay tablets recording administrative operations, contracts and acts dealing with family law. Despite these voluminous sources, the topic of work and the contribution of women have rarely been addressed. This book examines occupations involving women over the course of three millennia of Near Eastern history. It presents the various aspects of women as economic agents inside and outside of the family structure. Inside the family, women were the main actors in the production of goods necessary for everyday life. In some instances, their activities exceeded the simple needs of the household and were integrated within the production of large organizations or commercial channels. The contributions presented in this volume are representative enough to address issues in various domains: social, economic, religious, etc., from varied points of view: archaeological, historical, sociological, anthropological, and with a gender perspective. This book will be a useful tool for historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and graduate students interested in the economy of the ancient Near East and in women and gender studies.

Scholars often assume that the nature of Mesopotamian kingship was such that questioning royal authority was impossible. This volume challenges that general assumption, by presenting an analysis of the motivations,methods, and motifs behind a scholarly discourse about kingship that arose in the final stages of the last Mesopotamian empires. The focus of the volume is the proliferation of a literature that problematizes authority in the Neo-Assyrian period, when texts first begin to specifically explore various modalities for critique of royalty. This development is symptomatic of a larger discourse about the limits of power that emerges after the repatriation of Marduk's statue to Babylon during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar I in the 12th century BCE. From this point onwards, public attitudes toward Marduk provide a framework for the definition of proper royal behavior, and become a point of contention between Assyria and Babylonia. It is in this historical and political context that several important Akkadian compositions are placed. The texts are analyzed from a new perspective that sheds light on their original milieux and intended functions.

This volume examines the state ideology of Assyria in the Early Neo-Assyrian period (934-745 BCE) focusing on how power relations between the Mesopotamian deities, the Assyrian king, and foreign lands are described and depicted. It undertakes a close reading of delimited royal inscriptions and iconography making use of postcolonial and gender theory, and addresses such topics as royal deification, \"religious imperialism\", ethnicity and empire, and gendered imagery. The important contribution of this study lies especially in its identification of patterns of ideological continuity and variation within the reigns of individual rulers, between various localities, and between the different rulers of this period, and in its discussion of the place of Early Neo-Assyrian state ideology in the overall development of Assyrian propaganda. It includes several indexed appendices, which list all primary sources, present all divine and royal epithets, and provide all of the \"royal visual representations,\" and incorporates numerous illustrations, such as maps, plans, and royal iconography.

This volume unearths surprising evidence from the earliest phase of historical consciousness in the ancient Near East, in particular shining a light on the mysterious origins of Egypt's civilization and its links with Mesopotamia and the early Hebrews. Here, we look at the archaeological evidence for the Flood, evidence now misinterpreted and ignored. After the rise of the first literate cultures in the wake of the catastrophe, we trace the story of the great migration which led groups of early Mesopotamians westward toward Egypt, where they helped to establish Egyptian civilization. This migration, recalled in the biblical story of Abraham, provides the first link between Egyptian and Hebrew histories. The next link comes a few generations later with Imhotep, the great seer who solved the crisis of a seven-year famine by interpreting pharaoh Djoser's dream. Imhotep is shown to be the same person as Joseph, son of Jacob. This well-researched book takes a radically alternative view of the rise of high civilization in the Near East and the forces which propelled it. Emmet Sweeney finds that the early civilizations developed amidst a background of massive and repeated natural catastrophes, events which had a profound effect upon the ancient peoples and left its mark upon their myths, legends, customs and religions. The author's series Ages in Alignment (of which this is Volume 1), takes a radically alternative view of the rise of high civilization in the Near East and the forces which propelled it. Emmet Sweeney finds that the early civilizations developed amidst a background of massive and repeated natural catastrophes, events which had a profound effect upon the ancient peoples and left its mark upon their myths, legends, customs and religions. Ideas found in all corners of the globe, concepts such as dragon-worship, pyramid-building, and human sacrifice, are shown by Sweeney to have a common origin in the cataclysmic events of the period termed the \"eruptive age\" by legendary English explorer Percy Fawcett. Terrified and traumatized by the forces of nature, people all over the world began to keep an obsessive watch on the heavens and to offer blood sacrifices to the angry sky gods. These events, which are fundamental to any understanding of the first literate cultures, have nonetheless been completely effaced from the history books and an official \"history\" of mankind, which is little more than an elaborate fiction, now graces the bookshelves of the world's great libraries. Starting with clues unearthed by history sleuth Immanuel Velikovsky and others, Sweeney takes the investigation further. While the Near Eastern civilizations are generally considered to have taken shape around 3300 BC - about 2,000 years before those of China and the New World - Ages in Alignment demonstrates that they had no 2,000-year head start. Sweeney suggests that all the ancient civilizations arose simultaneously around 1300 BC, in the wake of a terrible natural catastrophe recalled in legend as the Flood or Deluge. He points out that the presently accepted chronology of Egypt is not based on science but on venerated literary tradition, established by the third century BC when Jewish historians (utilizing the History of Egypt by the Hellenistic author Manetho) sought to tie in Egypt's history with that of the Bible. Apparent gaps and weird repetitions resulted. Improbable feats like the construction of major cut-stone engineering projects before the advent of steel tools or Pythagorean geometry point to the weaknesses of the traditional view. Taking a more rigorous approach and pointing to solid evidence, Emmet Sweeney shows where names overlap, and where one and the same group is mistaken for different peoples in different times.

In Architectural Representations in the Neo Assyrian Iconography Nicolas Gillmann addresses the specific nature of this rich and complex iconographical source and provides the reader with new interpretation keys.

This volume collects the proceedings of a three-day conference held in Madrid in July 2010, and it highlights the vitality of the study of late-third-millennium B.C. Mesopotamia. Workshops devoted to the Ur III period have been a feature of the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale roughly every other year, beginning in London in 2003. In 2009, Steve Garfinkle and Manuel Molina asked the community of Neo-Sumerian scholars to convene the following year in Madrid before the Rencontre in Barcelona. The meeting had more than 50 participants and included 8 topical sessions and 27 papers. The 21 contributions included in this volume cover a broad range of topics: new texts, new interpretations, and new understandings of the language, culture, and history of the Ur III period (2112–2004 B.C.). The present and future of Neo-Sumerian studies are important not only for the field of Assyriology but also for wider inquiries into the ancient world. The extant archives offer insight into some of the earliest cities and one of the earliest kingdoms in the historical record. The era of the Third Dynasty of Ur is also probably the best-attested century in antiquity. This imposes a responsibility on the small community of scholars who work on the Neo-Sumerian materials to make this it accessible to a broad, interdisciplinary audience in the humanities and related fields. This volume is a solid step in this direction.

Mesopotamia \"was an ancient region in which the world's earliest civilization developed. Mesopotamia included the area that is now Iraq, eastern Syria, and southeastern Turkey. It extended from the Taurus Mountains in the north to the Persian Gulf in the south, and from the Zagros Mountains in the east to the Syrian Desert in the west. The heart of the region was the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The name Mesopotamia comes from a later Greek word meaning between rivers.\" (World Book Student) Read more about Mesopotamia.