Robert Blust has recently established that – globally – dragons evolved from rainbow serpents, which in turn represent a prehistoric understanding of rainbows. The present paper explores the “dragon-scape” of ancient Egypt in search of traits that may have survived from these earlier stages. The cryptic pD.tyw Sw and Iaau of Coffin Text 698 mig…[Read more]

In ancient Egyptian medicine, the most common disease-causing demon is called nsy or nsyt. These names are phonetically close to those of a leading disease-causing demonic agent in medieval and early modern Europe, called nessia in Latin and nežit in Slavic languages. The demons of both regions were believed to invade the patient’s body to ca…[Read more]

Ancient Egyptian barque oracles had a recent counterpart in the phenomenon of “table-turning”, an occult process experienced in Nineteenth-Century Spiritualist séances. The séance table’s small-scale successor, the Talking Board, ensured that oracular locomotion persisted throughout the Twentieth Century; its best-known embodiment – the Ouija boa…[Read more]

The evidence for collapse of human civilizations at the start of the recently defined Meghalayan Age is equivocal

How we interpret the period preceding a collapse is important both in the desire to achieve historical accuracy and in that it affects the way we understand the collapse itself1. Intuition tells us that there must have been problems of some kind, crises or decline, prior to any collapse – enemies at the gate, structural issues in the functioning o…[Read more]

Despite many years of intensive research into burial and funeral practices in Late Bronze Age (LBA) Greece, emotion remains largely absent from the discussion. Yet death and the emotions it provoked would have been familiar aspects of daily life in Mycenaean Greece. The dead had to be dealt with and moved on through various rites until they became…[Read more]

This study challenges the 19th-century nationalist assumptions that have informed modern views of Aramean peoplehood in the first half of the first millennium BCE. I revisit the cuneiform sources, which offer the bulk of the existing evidence on the earliest Arameans, and demonstrate that they conceive of Arameans not as a single coherent people,…[Read more]

Very brief overview of the parameters of demand and supply for cuneiform knowledge production.

Mounted seals have frequently been uncovered in Middle Bronze Age archaeological contexts in the Levant and Egypt. However, direct evidence for the deployment of such seals to mark objects does not appear to have been systematically studied to date. This article presents an initial typology of impressions made using mounted seals found in the…[Read more]

The Tribe of Dan has always appeared to biblical scholars and archaeologists as something of an enigma. For decades, certain scholars, beginning with Yigael Yadin, have proposed a connection between the Denyen/Danaoi Sea People and the Danites of Ancient Israel, arguing that the former became the latter and were adopted into Israel at a later date…[Read more]

A summary and review of a creative and neutral approach to teaching the Documentary Hypothesis to undergraduate students.

This paper surveys potential counterparts of the ancient Egyptian concept of mAat (maat) from other cultures and summarises such cross-cultural studies as have already been completed. Its scope ranges from antiquity to the present day and across Europe, Africa, the Near East, India, China, Australia and the Americas. Paradigms that appear to…[Read more]

Does “authorship” still have a place in the study of the Hebrew Bible? Historical criticism has long sought to uncover the human authors behind the biblical texts. But how might the “death of the author,” so forcefully declared by Roland Barthes over fifty years ago, change the contours of this search? This volume brings together leading experts…[Read more]

This work provides new insights into the relationship between the Holiness legislation in Leviticus 17–26 and processes of cultic centralization in the Persian period. The author departs from the classical theory that Leviticus 17–26 merely presume, with minor modifications, a concept of centralization articulated in Deuteronomy. She shows how Lev…[Read more]

Early Jewish writings are replete with narratives of warfare and collective violence. Yet relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to how these accounts of violence affected the way Jews structured their festal calendar. This essay examines the festivals described in 1 and 2 Maccabees that serve to commemorate the most impressive m…[Read more]

This Open Access volume reveals how violent pasts were constructed by ancient Mediterranean societies, the ideologies they served, and the socio-political processes and institutions they facilitated. Combining case studies from Anatolia, Egypt, Greece, Israel/Judah, and Rome, it moves beyond essentialist dichotomies such as “victors” and “va…[Read more]

Research into emotions is a developing field within Assyriology, and NLP tools for Akkadian texts offers new perspectives on the data. We use PMI-based word embeddings to explore the relationship between parts of the body and emotions. Using data downloaded from Oracc, we ask which parts of the body were semantically linked to emotions. We do this…[Read more]

Beards were part of a visual matrix of expressing masculinity during the NeoAssyrian period (ca. 934–612 BCE). But masculinity does not exist in isolation and interacts with other aspects of identity. I will examine the beard as an indicator of masculine status during the Neo-Assyrian period. This will be done through investigating the visual a…[Read more]

During the Neo-Assyrian period (approximately 934-612 BCE, based in modern Iraq) the annals and royal inscriptions of several kings mention women with a curious title: ‘Queen of the Arabs’. These women have been included in previous discussions regarding Assyrian interaction with the ‘Arabs’, but a full investigation into their roles as rulers…[Read more]

This paper compares psychostasia and/or kerostasia concepts from Indo-European, Semitic and adjacent cultures, and relates them to Cognitive Metaphor Theory. In the context of metaphysical weighing, the religions of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome all associated lightness with goodness and/or a favourable outcome; Hinduism does likewise. The…[Read more]