Hatra is the richest archaeological site in the Parthian Empire known to date and has great potential for a better understanding of this enigmatic empire and its relationship with Rome. After an introduction to this little known site, seventeen contributions written by leading experts in the field provide the reader with the latest insights into this important late-Parthian settlement. They touch upon three themes. The first section, ""Between Parthia and Rome"" contains three articles that discuss the relationship between Parthia and Rome on the one hand, and Parthia and its vassal states.

Volume III Part II describes the rise and fall of the great empires of Assyria and Babylonia, the sack of Jerusalem and the exile of the Jews in Babylon.

This handbook is a guide to Iran's complex history. The book emphasizes the large-scale continuities of Iranian history while also describing the important patterns of transformation that have characterized Iran's past.

The year of the four emperors in AD 193 shows the cosmopolitan interconnectedness of the Roman Empire, yet scholarship has long framed the Severan dynasty in a narrative of descent stressing their North African and in particular their Syrian origins. The contributions of this volume question this conventional approach and instead examine more closely actual Severan policy in the Near East to detect potential local connections that determined this policy as well as how local communities and elites reacted to it. The volume thus explores new beginnings and old connections in the Roman Near East.

Graffiti are an often neglected but crucial witness to everyday life of ancient civilizations. The Aramaic graffiti from Hatra (North Iraq) can make an invaluable contribution in this sense, distributed as they were in various buildings throughout this city which flourished between the 1st and the 3rd century AD. Thanks to an effective interaction between epigraphy and archaeology, Marco Moriggi and Ilaria Bucci offer a thorough analysis of the Aramaic graffiti from Hatra as documented by the Archive of the Missione Archeologica Italiana (Turin). In addition to the edition of 48 published and 37 unpublished graffiti, this study further includes the concordances of numbers of all Hatran texts published so far and full archaeological information about the graffiti.

Aramaic is a constant thread running through the various civilizations of the Near East, ancient and modern, from 1000 BCE to the present, and has been the language of small principalities, world empires, and a fair share of the Jewish-Christian tradition. Holger Gzella describes its cultural and linguistic history as a continuous evolution from its beginnings to the advent of Islam. For the first time the individual phases of the language, their socio-historical underpinnings, and the textual sources are discussed comprehensively in light of the latest linguistic and historical research and with ample attention to scribal traditions, multilingualism, and language as a marker of cultural self-awareness. Many new observations on Aramaic are thereby integrated into a coherent historical framework.

This book exposes the mimetic assumption involved in early Islamic historiography, its literary practice and whatever subverts it as reflected in Ṭabarī's History. Four major events in the history of early Islam are then subject to analysis based on literary criticism and are shown to produce a new meaning.