In recent years cuneiform studies have witnessed a growing interest in issues variously related to the broadly defined field of palaeography. This led to the development of new methodologies and technologies as well as to the establishment of several projects devoted to the palaeographic analysis of cuneiform corpora from Mesopotamia, Syria, Anatolia and New Kingdom Egypt, spanning from the 3rd to the 1st millennium BC. This volume collects papers from scholars who had been working on topics such as writing space, wedge order, quantitative analysis, text reconstruction, sign identification and palaeographic dating, providing an updated overview on the present state of the art.

The present volume collects the papers presented at the second workshop devoted to "Current Research in Cuneiform Palaeography" and brings new insights to a field of cuneiform studies that during the last decade had been witnessing ever growing attention among scholars. The contributions provide a wide perspective on the topic by investigating text corpora that date from the 3rd to the 1st millennium BCE and derive from the whole Ancient Near East (from southern Mesopotamia, to Anatolia, Syria and the northern Levant).

In Mittani Palaeography, Zenobia Homan analyses cuneiform writing from the Late Bronze Age Mittani state, which was situated in the region between modern Aleppo, Erbil and Diyarbakır. The ancient communication network reveals a story of local scribal tradition blended with regional adaptation and international political change, reflecting the ways in which written knowledge travelled within the cuneiform culture of the Middle East. Mittani signs, their forms, and variants, are described and defined in detail utilising a large digital database and discussed in relation to other regional corpora (Assyro-Mittanian, Middle Assyrian, Nuzi and Tigunanum among others). The collected data indicate that Mittanian was comparatively standardised – an innovation for the period – signifying the existence of a centralised system of scribal training.

In the week between July 21 and 25, 2014, the University of Warsaw hosted more than three hundred Assyriologists from all over the world. In the course of five days, nearly 150 papers were read in three (and sometimes four) parallel sessions. Many of them were delivered within the framework of nine thematic workshops. The publication of most of these panels is underway, in separate volumes. As is usually the case, the academic sessions were accompanied by many opportunities for social interaction among the participants, and there was time to enjoy the historical and cultural benefits of Warsaw. Special honor was accorded to two American Assyriologists whose origins can be traced to Warsaw, Piotr Michalowski and Piotr Steinkeller, and a special session to recognize their contributions to the study of ancient Mesopotamia was organized. In this book are presented papers on the main theme of the meeting, “Fortune and Misfortune in the Ancient Near East.” The 31 essays are organized into 5 sections: (1) plenary presenations on “What Is Fortune? What Is Misfortune?” ; (2) humanity and fortune/misfortune and luck, with discussion of specific examples; (3) additional papers on definitions of fortune and misfortune; (4) the effects on city and state; and (5) God and temple.

The Amarna letters from Canaan offer us a unique glimpse of the historical and linguistic panorama of the Levant in the middle of the fourteenth century BCE. Their evidence regarding verbs is crucial for the historical and comparative study of the Semitic languages. Proper evaluation of this evidence requires an understanding of its scribal origin and nature. For this reason, The Verb in the Amarna Letters from Canaan addresses the historical circumstances in which the linguistic code of the letters was born and the unique characteristics of this system. The author adduces second-language acquisition as a proper framework for understanding the development of this language by scribes who were educated in centers on the cuneiform periphery. In this way, the book advances a novel interpretation: the letters testify to a scribal interlanguage that was born of the local use of cuneiform and was affected by the fossilization and transfer processes taking place in these language learners. This vision of the linguistic system of the letters as the learners' interlanguage informs the main part of the book, which is devoted to verbal morphology and semantics. The chapter on morphology offers an overview of conjugation patterns and morphemes in terms of paradigms. Employing a variationist approach, it also analyzes the bases on which the verbal forms were constructed. Next, the individual uses of each form are illustrated by numerous examples that provide readers with a basis for discovering alternative interpretations. The systemic view of each form and the various insights that permeate this book provide invaluable data for the historical and comparative study of the West Semitic verbal system, particularly of ancient Hebrew, Ugaritic, and Arabic.

Editing and examining source-critically for the first time the Late Babylonian ritual texts dealing with the New Year Festival, this book proposes an incisive re-interpretation of the most frequently discussed of all Mesopotamian rituals.

"This sweeping history of the ancient Near East (Mesopotamia, Syria, Anatolia, Iran) takes readers on a journey from the creation of the world's first cities to the conquest of Alexander the Great. The book is built around the life stories of many ancient men and women, from kings, priestesses, and merchants to bricklayers, musicians, and weavers. Their habits of daily life, beliefs, triumphs, and crises, and the changes that they faced over time are explored through their written words and the archaeological remains of the buildings, cities, and empires in which they lived. Rather than chronicling three thousand years of kingdoms, the book instead creates a tapestry of life stories through which readers come to know specific individuals from many walks of life, and to understand their places within the broad history of events and institutions in the ancient Near East. These life stories are preserved on ancient cuneiform tablets, which allow us to trace, for example, the career of a weaver as she advanced to became a supervisor of a workshop, listen to a king trying to persuade his generals to prepare for a siege, and feel the pain of a starving young couple who were driven to sell all four of their young children into slavery during a famine. What might seem at first glance to be a remote and inaccessible ancient culture proves to be a comprehensible world, one that bequeathed to us many of our institutions and beliefs, a truly fascinating place to visit"--

This volume is a concentrated examination of the varied roles of scribes and scribal practices in ancient Israel and Judah, shedding light on the social world of the Hebrew Bible. Divided into discussion of three key aspects, the book begins by assessing praxis and materiality, looking at the tools and materials used by scribes, where they came from and how they worked in specific contexts. The contributors then move to observe the power and status of scribal cultures, and how scribes functioned within their broader social world. Finally, the volume offers perspectives that examine ideological issues at play in both antiquity and the modern context(s) of biblical scholarship. Taken together, these essays demonstrate that no text is produced in a void, and no writer functions without a network of resources.

In Kizzuwatna, Andrea Trameri presents a history of the kingdom of Kizzuwatna, located in Cilicia (southern Anatolia), from its origins to the fall of the Hittite Empire. Encompassing both philological and archaeological evidence in the discussion, this book is the first comprehensive historical study of interdisciplinary scope dedicated to Kizzuwatna and the region of Cilicia in the second millennium BC. The book presents and re-analyses a diverse array of sources and data, providing an updated overview of various topics of interest beyond political history – including historical geography, culture and religion, population and language. Some new findings and proposals further contribute to an improved understanding of the history of the Hittite kingdom and other neighboring regions in the Middle and Late Bronze Age (ca. 2000-1200 BC).