This volume deals with the cuneiform tablets discovered by Sir Leonard Woolley in his excavation at Atshana, as interpreted by D.J.Wiseman, Assistant Keeper in the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities of the British Museum. The book forms an appropriate companion to No. 1 of this series, The State of Idri-mi, by Professor Sidney Smith, which was published in 1949.
In order to present the Aramean history during some six hundred years, down to the seventh century B.C., it was necessary to analyze a wide range of sources, mainly cuneiform, epigraphic, and biblical. Chapter I deals with Aramean pre-history and proto-history, while chapter II examines the question of the alleged relationship between the Hebrew forefathers and the ancient Arameans. Chapters III to XIV give a relatively accurate description of the territory of each historically attested Aramean group or state and present a detailed narrative of political events. Chapter XIV, the most extensive, considers the situation of the Arameans in Babylonia, also in relation to the Chaldeans and to the North-Arabian tribes. Chapters XV to XVIII deal with Aramean institutions, economy, legal practices, and religion. Special attention is paid to linguistic features of the available evidence, when they can help resolving historical questions. The book concludes with an extensive general index and with an index of biblical sources.
How to Decipher the Byblos Script' reflects the lifelong research and publications by Dr. Jan Best. This volume brings together his most groundbreaking articles. At the center of the work of Dr. Best is his remarkable achievement of deciphering the Byblos Script. This could never have been achieved without the previous reconstructions of the Cretan Hieroglyphic and Linear A scripts, which are closely related to the Byblos Script. Here are the results of 40 years of frontier research quietly carried out behind the scenes of the scientific community. This publication for the first time discloses to the general public the impact of this research and makes its findings accessible to the wider public of the interested general reader and other specialists in this field. It represents the type of basic research fundamental to any scientific follow-up studies.
A twentieth-anniversary reprint of the landmark book that launched the current explosion of social-scientific studies in the biblical field. It sets forth a cultural-material methodology for reconstructing the origins of ancient Israel and offers the hypothesis that Israel emerged as an indigenous social revolutionary peasant movement. In a new preface, written for this edition, Gottwald takes account of the 'sea change' in biblical studies since 1979 as he reviews the impact of his work on church and academy, assesses its merits and limitations, indicates his present thinking on the subject, and points toward future directions in the social-critical study of ancient Israel and the Hebrew Bible.
Legal texts recording the purchase or exchange of entire settlements are among the most important cuneiform tablets discovered at Old Babylonian/Middle Bronze Age (Level VII) Alalah. Following the Man of Yamhad is the first book-length study of these legal texts and the socio-economic practice that they document. The author explores the nature of the alienated settlements, the rights enjoyed by their owners, the underlying system of land tenure, and the larger political context in which the transactions occurred. The study is supported by extensive collations and up-to-date editions of relevant legal and administrative texts. Its conclusions will be of interest to anyone working on the history, society, and economy of the Bronze Age Near East.
