Examines letters from the Tell el-Amarna archive in Egypt, written between Egypt and other Middle Eastern nations ca. 1360-1334 B.C. Uses material and chemical analysis for provenance information and historical geography.

Originally published in 1939, this book contains an assessment of the historical evidence provided by ancient Babylonian cuneiform tablets. The text is accompanied by a number of photographs of the tablets, as well as of important archaeological sites and Babylonian artefacts. Chiera's enthusiasm for his subject is clear, as the text is accessibly written and contains many Babylonian legends and assesses their relationship to biblical texts. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Assyriology and the ancient Middle East.

When the ancient city of Ebla was unearthed, archaeologists discovered the well-preserved royal library containing more than 15,000 clay tablets and fragments. At digs in modern-day Syria, the Ebla tablets provide unique insight into the culture and and history of ancient Mesopotamia.

Cuneiform script on tablets of clay is, as far as we know, the oldest form of writing in the world. The choice of clay as writing medium in ancient Mesopotamia meant that records of all kinds could survive down to modern times, preserving fascinating documents from ancient civilization, written by a variety of people and societies. From reading these tablets we can understand not only the history and economics of the time but also the beliefs, ideas and superstitions. This new book will bring the world in which the cuneiform was written to life for the non-expert reader, revealing how ancient inscriptions can lead to a new way of thinking about the past. It will explain how this pre-alphabetic writing really worked and how it was possible to use cuneiform signs to record so many different languages so long ago. Richly illustrated with a wealth of fresh examples ranging from elementary school exercises to revealing private letters or beautifully calligraphic literature for the royal library, we will meet people that arent so very different from ourselves. We will read the work of many scribes from mundane record keepers to state fortune tellers, using tricks from puns to cryptography. For the first time cuneiform tablets and their messages are not remote and inaccessible, but wonderfully human documents that resonate today.

"He is known today, as he was then, only as Dave. His jugs and storage jars were everyday items, but because of their beauty and sometimes massive size they are now highly sought after by collectors. Born about 1801, Dave was taught to turn pots in Edgefield, South Carolina, the center of alkaline-glazed pottery production. He also learned to read and write, in spite of South Carolina's long-standing fear of slave literacy. Even when the state made it a crime to teach a slave to write, Dave signed his pots and inscribed many of them with poems. Though his verses spoke simply of his daily experience, they were nevertheless powerful statements. He countered the slavery system not by writing words of protest but by daring to write at all. We know of no other slave artist who put his name on his work." "When Leonard Todd discovered that his family had owned Dave, he moved from Manhattan to Edgefield, where his ancestors had established the first potteries in the area. Todd studied each of Dave's poems for biographical clues, which he pieced together with local records and family letters to create this moving and dramatic chronicle of Dave's life - a story of creative triumph in the midst of oppression. Many of Dave's astounding jars are found now in America's finest museums, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Charleston Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston."--BOOK JACKET.

We worship an endlessly creative God whose thumbprints are reflected everywhere we look—in sunsets, ocean waves and the invisible rhythms that shape our lives. Join Luci Shaw as she ponders through poetry and prose the unexpected places where she encounters God's fingerprints, and let it help you learn to see them in your life as well.

Manuscript cultures have frequently forgotten, neglected, or even erased women's contributions from memory. Women's agency has also been a glaring blind spot in the scholarly pursuit of gender perspectives on the production of written artefacts. This volume addresses these lacunae by highlighting manuscripts and inscriptions by and for women, their active participation and enabling sponsorship, and their role in the circulation and dissemination of written artefacts. Seven papers present case studies from East Asian inscriptions to ancient cuneiform epigraphic, Egyptian graffiti from late antiquity to individual specimen and large-scale collections in medieval Europe, focusing on how women participated in and contributed to those. How did they assert their involvement, their claims and their aspirations? By what rationales and mechanisms were they excluded or their contribution marginalised? How did they react to structures that discriminated against them, eventually circumventing, subverting and transforming them? The present volume sheds light on new findings, gives unique insights and discusses methodological considerations in the budding field of women's manuscript studies.