Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia explores the earliest historical evidence related to imprisonment in the history of the world. While many historical investigations into prisons have revolved around the important question of punishment, this work moves beyond that more narrow approach to consider the multifunctional practices of detaining the body in ancient Iraq. It is the contention of this book that imprisonment arose out of the desire to control and detain the body in relation to labor. The practice of detainment for coercion became adaptable to a variety of circumstances and goals, which shaped the contexts and practices of imprisonment. With time, religious ideology was attached to imprisonment. In one literary text, a prisoner was refined like silver and given new birth in the prison. The misery of imprisonment gave rise to lament through which a criminal could be ritually purified and restored to a right relationship with their personal god. Beyond this literary perspective, this work reconstructs how imprisonment and religious ideology intersected with the judicial process and explores the evidence related to the reasons behind imprisonment, the treatment of prisoners, and the evidence related to the lengths of their stays.

Winner of the Runciman Award Winner of the Charles J. Goodwin Award “Tells the story of how the Seleucid Empire revolutionized chronology by picking a Year One and counting from there, rather than starting a new count, as other states did, each time a new monarch was crowned...Fascinating.” —Harper’s In the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s conquests, his successors, the Seleucid kings, ruled a vast territory stretching from Central Asia and Anatolia to the Persian Gulf. In 305 BCE, in a radical move to impose unity and regulate behavior, Seleucus I introduced a linear conception of time. Time would no longer restart with each new monarch. Instead, progressively numbered years—continuous and irreversible—became the de facto measure of historical duration. This new temporality, propagated throughout the empire and identical to the system we use today, changed how people did business, recorded events, and oriented themselves to the larger world. Some rebellious subjects, eager to resurrect their pre-Hellenic past, rejected this new approach and created apocalyptic time frames, predicting the total end of history. In this magisterial work, Paul Kosmin shows how the Seleucid Empire’s invention of a new kind of time—and the rebellions against this worldview—had far reaching political and religious consequences, transforming the way we organize our thoughts about the past, present, and future. “Without Paul Kosmin’s meticulous investigation of what Seleucus achieved in creating his calendar without end we would never have been able to comprehend the traces of it that appear in late antiquity...A magisterial contribution to this hitherto obscure but clearly important restructuring of time in the ancient Mediterranean world.” —G. W. Bowersock, New York Review of Books “With erudition, theoretical sophistication, and meticulous discussion of the sources, Paul Kosmin sheds new light on the meaning of time, memory, and identity in a multicultural setting.” —Angelos Chaniotis, author of Age of Conquests

The second volume in an ongoing series sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), "Urbanization and Land Ownership in the Ancient Near East" examines the impact of debt, private land ownership, and urbanization on ancient societies. Evidence of privatization of land is supported by archaeological data, surviving documents, and financial records. This volume contains three sets of papers ranging from the Ice Age through early Egypt and Bronze Age Sumer, Babylonia, and Israel, given by archaeologists, economists, Assyriologists, and Egyptologists. The first set of papers deals with the social cosmology of early urban areas as ritual centers. The second set focuses on the physical archaeology of Near Eastern cities and reconstructs their land-use patterns. The final set examines what Assyriologists have been able to extract from the cuneiform record concerning urban land use, land tenure, and the emergence of real estate as something privately owned and transferable. One of the most valuable parts of this volume is the oral discussion of each paper by the participants. Highlighting the different methodologies used in each discipline and the difficulties in establishing a common vocabulary, these discussions raise universal questions concerning ancient economies and their relevancy to long-term economic trends. The first volume in this series was "Privatization in the Ancient Near East and Classical World," edited by Michael Hudson and Baruch A. Levine (Peabody Museum Bulletin 5, ISBN 0-87365-955-4).

Gudea of Lagash, who ruled at the end of the third millennium B.C., wanted to be remembered as a temple builder. An extensive narrative inscribed on two huge clay cylinders, one of the longest and best preserved Sumerian texts, recounts his construction of the temple of Ningirsu, Lagash's patron deity. More than sixty sculpted limestone fragments belong to several stelae erected in the temples Gudea built and depict their construction. A large number of inscribed and often sculpted, artifacts provide additional information on Gudea's activities. This study treats this visual and textual material as a coherent corpus for the first time. It analyses contents, narrative structure, composition and message. Text and image are compared to elucidate the characteristics of each medium and to arrive at a comprehensive picture of the royal rhetoric of the time. The book includes a catalogue of all artifacts, and a translation of selected text passages.

This book demonstrates Girsu is a primary locale for re-analyzing, through an interdisciplinary approach combining archaeological and textual evidence, the origins of the Sumerian city-state.

This volume collects the proceedings of a three-day conference held in Madrid in July 2010, and it highlights the vitality of the study of late-third-millennium B.C. Mesopotamia. Workshops devoted to the Ur III period have been a feature of the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale roughly every other year, beginning in London in 2003. In 2009, Steve Garfinkle and Manuel Molina asked the community of Neo-Sumerian scholars to convene the following year in Madrid before the Rencontre in Barcelona. The meeting had more than 50 participants and included 8 topical sessions and 27 papers. The 21 contributions included in this volume cover a broad range of topics: new texts, new interpretations, and new understandings of the language, culture, and history of the Ur III period (2112–2004 B.C.). The present and future of Neo-Sumerian studies are important not only for the field of Assyriology but also for wider inquiries into the ancient world. The extant archives offer insight into some of the earliest cities and one of the earliest kingdoms in the historical record. The era of the Third Dynasty of Ur is also probably the best-attested century in antiquity. This imposes a responsibility on the small community of scholars who work on the Neo-Sumerian materials to make this it accessible to a broad, interdisciplinary audience in the humanities and related fields. This volume is a solid step in this direction.

Presents an introduction to the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, from the earliest rise of the Sumerians to the seventh century C.E. Sasanian period, discussing the history, government, literature, religion, art, and architecture of each era.

With topics ranging from social and economic history to literature, language, and to art history and arachaeology, the essays in his book reflect the broad spectrum of interests of its honoree, Benjamin R. Foster.