The thousands of surviving inscriptions in Middle Aramaic (e.g., in the Nabataean, Syriac and Palmyrene dialects) are an underused resource in the study of the Near East in the Roman period, especially in the study of religion and law. Particularly important was the emergence during this period of new peoples with their cultural roots in Arabia, such as the Nabataeans. This volume collects together, under the interrelated themes of religion and law, twenty-three articles by John Healey, with sections on "Petra and Nabataean Aramaic", "Edessa and Early Syriac" and "Aramaic and Society in the Roman Near East". Individual papers discuss the continuation of "Ancient Near Eastern" culture, the Aramaic legal tradition as well as the development of both written and spoken forms of Syriac and Nabatean.

The thousands of surviving inscriptions in Middle Aramaic (e.g., in the Nabataean, Syriac and Palmyrene dialects) are an underused resource in the study of the Near East in the Roman period, especially in the study of religion and law. Particularly important was the emergence during this period of new peoples with their cultural roots in Arabia, such as the Nabataeans. This volume collects together, under the interrelated themes of religion and law, twenty-three articles by John Healey, with sections on "Petra and Nabataean Aramaic", "Edessa and Early Syriac" and "Aramaic and Society in the Roman Near East". Individual papers discuss the continuation of "Ancient Near Eastern" culture, the Aramaic legal tradition as well as the development of both written and spoken forms of Syriac and Nabatean.

Discover a comprehensive and cross-disciplinary handbook exploring several sub-regions and key themes perfect for a new generation of students A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East delivers the first complete handbook in the area of Hellenistic and Roman Near Eastern history. The book is divided into sections dealing with interdisciplinary source material, each with a great deal of regional variety and engaging with several key themes. It integrates discussions of the classical Near East with the typical undergraduate teaching syllabus in the Anglo-Saxon world. All contributors in this edited volume are leading scholars in their field, with a combination of established researchers and academics, and emerging voices. Contributors hail from countries across several continents, and work in various disciplines, including Ancient History, Archaeology, Art History, Epigraphy, Numismatics, and Oriental Studies. In addition to furthering the integration of the Levantine lands in the classical periods into the teaching canon, the book offers readers: The first comprehensively structured Companion and edited handbook on the Hellenistic and Roman Near East Extensive regional and sub-regional variety in the cross-disciplinary source material A way to compensate for the recent destruction of monuments in the region and the new generation of researchers’ inability to examine these historical stages in person An integration of the study of the Hellenistic and Roman Near East with traditional undergraduate teaching syllabi in the Anglo-Saxon world Perfect for undergraduate history and classics students studying the Near East, A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East will also earn a place in the libraries of graduate students and scholars working within Near Eastern studies, as well as interested members of the public with a passion for history.

Arabs and Empires before Islam illuminates the history of the Arabs before the emergence of Islam, collating nearly 250 translated extracts from an extensive array of ancient sources. Drawn from a broad period between the eighth century BC and the Middle Ages, the sources include texts originally written in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Persian, and Arabic, inscriptions in a variety of languages and alphabets, and discussions of archaeological sites from across the Near East. More than twenty international experts from the fields of archaeology, classics and ancient history, linguistics and philology, epigraphy, and art history provide detailed commentary on and analysis of this diverse selection of material. Richly illustrated with sixteen colour plates, fifteen maps, and over seventy in-text images, the volume provides a comprehensive, wide-ranging, and up-to-date examination of what ancient sources had to say about the politics, culture, and religion of the Arabs in the pre-Islamic period. It offers a full consideration of the traces which the Arabs have left in the epigraphic, literary, and archaeological records, and sheds light on their relationship with their often more-powerful neighbours: the states and empires of the ancient Near East. Arabs and Empires before Islam gathers together a host of material never before collected into a single volume - some of which appears in English translation for the very first time - and provides a single point of reference for a vibrant and dynamic area of research.

Michael C.A. Macdonald is one of the great names of Arabian Studies. He pioneered the field of Ancient North Arabian and made invaluable contributions to the history of Arabia and the nomads of the Near East, their languages, and their scripts. This volume gathers thirty-two innovative contributions from leading scholars in the field to honor the career of Michael C.A. Macdonald, covering the languages and scripts of ancient Arabia, their history and archaeology, the Hellenistic Near East, and the modern dialects and languages of Arabia. The book is an essential part of the library of any who study the Near East, its languages and its cultures.

Petra in modern southern Jordan is universally known as one of the most frequented touristic sites in the Near East, inscribed on the UNESCO world heritage list. Modern visitors are attracted by the romantic aspect of the rock-cut tomb façades, heavily contrasting in their baroque stile with the desert like surrounding of the rocky and arid landscape. These monuments were the result of the long time presence of the Arab tribe of the Nabataeans who made Petra their capital when they became, at least partially, sedentarised during the Hellenistic period, i.e between the late 4th to late 1st centuries BCE. How exactly this process of sedentarisation happened, how the site of Petra changed from a temporary dwelling place of a small Bedouin tribe to one of the blinking capitals of the ancient Near East that attracted - as it is the case today - visitors from all over the world, was the subject of a three years research program, jointly sponsored by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) and the German Research Foundation (DFG). At the end of the program, an international conference, held in Berlin in December 2011, brought together several dozen of scholars from all over the world in order to pinpoint the state of research on the Formation of the Nabataean capital. The contributions of the present volume focus on questions related to the natural environment of the site, on the geology and geography as well as on architecture, small finds and social dynamics, probably the clue for a better understanding of the functioning of the Nabataean kingdom and its capital Petra.

The papers assembled in this selection of studies range in subject matter from early Judaic magic to an inscribed monument of the Neo-Classical period. The principal emphasis of the collection is nevertheless on religious developments under the High Roman Empire: problems arising from the interpretation of oriental cults imported from the Hellenistic East but primarily the development of imperial cult, the one universal religion of the empire before the coming of Christianity. The essays divide into five categories: Divinity and Power; The Imperial Numen; The Imperial Cult: Review and Discussion; Rituals and Ceremonies; Ainigmata. The titles of the individual articles speak for themselves but readers may also find the preface of interest in so far as it sets out the author's ideas on the controversial nature of the emperor's divinity. While this is a topic deserving of a book in its own right, the preface together with the points raised by individual studies within the overall framework may go some way to repairing this defficiency.

The twenty-one studies assembled in this volume focus on the apparatus and practitioners of religions in the western Roman empire, the enclaves, temples, altars and monuments that served the cults of a wide range of divinities through the medium of priests and worshippers. Discussion focuses on the analysis or reconstruction of the centres at which devotees gathered and draws on the full range of available evidence. While literary authorities remain of primary concern, these are for the most part overshadowed by other categories of evidence, in particular archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics and iconography, sources in some cases confirmed by the latest geophysical techniques - electrical resistivity tomography or ground-probing radar. The material is conveniently presented by geographical area, using modern rather than Latin terminology: Rome, Italy, Britain, Gaul, Spain, Hungary, along with a broader section that covers the empire in general. The titles of the various articles speak for themselves but readers may find the preface of interest in so far as it sets out my ideas on the use of ancient evidence and the pitfalls of some of the approaches favoured by modern scholars. Together with the wide range of individual papers the preface makes the book of interest to all students of the Roman empire as well as those specifically concerned with the history of religions.

The Roman Near East has been a source of fascination and exasperation - an immense area, a rich archaeological heritage as well as documents in several local languages, a region with a great depth of urbanisation and development ... yet relatively neglected by modern researchers and difficult to work on and in. Local archaeologists are often under-funded and the Roman period viewed as an earlier phase of western colonialism. Happily, the immense surge in archaeological and historical research on the Roman period everywhere has included the Roman Near East and there have been significant academic developments. This collection of studies on the Roman Near East represents Professor Kennedy’s academic assessment of the region, which began with his doctoral thesis on the contribution of Syria to the Roman army. Although the thesis was never published, several articles owe their genesis to work done then or soon after and are included here (VI, VII, IX, XII). Initial visits to military sites in Syria and Jordan swiftly brought out the presence in many cases of associated civil settlements and - though often now gone, the traces of ancient field systems. Hence, the two prominent sub-themes in this collection are the Roman military and various aspects of society and settlement - settlement types, farming, logistical underpinning and communications.

Semitic Languages in Contact contains twenty case studies analysing various contact situations involving Semitic languages. The languages treated span from ancient Semitic languages, such as Akkadian, Aramaic, Classical Ethiopic, Hebrew, Phoenician, and Ugaritic, to modern ones, including languages/dialects belonging to the Modern Arabic, Modern South Arabian, Neo-Aramaic, and Neo-Ethiopian branches of the Semitic family. The topics discussed include writing systems, phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. The approaches range from traditional philology to more theoretically-driven linguistics. These diverse studies are united by the theme of language contact. Thus, the volume aims to provide the status quaestionis of the study of language contact among the Semitic languages. With contributions from A. Al-Jallad, A. Al-Manaser, D. Appleyard, S. Boyd, Y. Breuer, M. Bulakh, D. Calabro, E. Cohen, R. Contini, C. J. Crisostomo, L. Edzard, H. Hardy, U. Horesh, O. Jastrow, L. Kahn, J. Lam, M. Neishtadt, M. Oren, P. Pagano, A. D. Rubin, L. Sayahi, J.Tubach, J. P. Vita, and T. Zewi.