New material on Ur added to Sumerian Shakespeare site

Jerald Starr has recently added material on the Royal Tombs of Ur and the Standard of Ur to his Sumerian Shakespeare site
Link to the Sumerian Shakespeare website directly from http://sumerianshakespeare.com/58401.html or find it on the SOAS Library subject guide for the Ancient Near East

New web resource for the history of the Hellenic World

Encyclopedia of the Hellenic World

This resource is maintained by the Foundation of the Hellenic World and co-funded by the EU. The Encyclopedia covers Asia Minor, the Black Sea area and Constantinople / Byzantium from ancient times and includes articles, bibliographies, a directory of related weblinks and an historical interactive atlas with audio-visual material. Some parts of the site are still under construction. Texts are multilingual, but there is a "translate" facility. The site has both simple and advanced search options.

SEAL Project (Sources of Early Akkadian Literature)

Leipzig University has just relaunched the SEAL (Sources of Early Akkadian Literature) project website. This is a detailed catalogue of over 300 Akkadian and bilingual texts from Old Akkadian to the Middle Babylonian / Middle Assyrian periods.
The catalogue is arranged thematically and is completely searchable. It indicates where the tablets are held. Unfortunately, copyright restrictions mean very few records are supplied with illustrations of the tablets

Persepolis Fortification Archive Project blog

Link to the blog for the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project Blog (Oriental Institute, University of Chicago) for news on the project and the site, all annual reports from 2003 onwards, and a listing of Oriental Institute publications on Iranian civilization (most of which are free online).
Reports include plenty of images and videos
N.B. The above link is via AWOL (Ancient World Online).
You can also link directly to the Blog from http://persepolistablets.blogspot.com/

Gilgamesh video

Watch a video presentation about the Gilgamesh epic. Featured cast members include Assyriologist Ben Foster, comic book illustrator Jim Starlin, and poet and playwright Yusef Komunyakaa.
The accompanying website includes excerpts from the text, along with background material and reading support, an interactive timeline and a feature on translation.
This is one title on the Invitation to World Literature series from Annenburg Media, an American company supplying multimedia resources to schools and colleges

Mesopotamian mathematics: cuneiform slideshow

Slideshow from the New York Times website of 13 cuneiform clay tablets dating from 1900 to 1700 BC from an exhibition at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Many of these are exercises by students studying to be scribes who were learning mathematics based on the extinct Sumerian language


For more background on the exhibition and the tablets, go to artdaily.org and the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World's own website

A Sumerian literary tour-de-force?

Sumerian Shakespeare is a personal blog by American Sumerologist Jerald Starr devoted to images and textual analysis of the cuneiform tablet  #36 from the Library of Congress's collection, which he states is an encoded "literary tour-de-force"
The blog also looks at the the image and portrayal of the Sumerian ruler, Ur-Namma, in sculpture and carved relief, and Starr's own experience learning to read and write Sumerian cuneiform

Law, literature and murder in the Ancient Near East: public lecture

This free lecture by Professor Piotr Michalowski, in honour of his late colleague, Raymond Westbrook, will take place at New London Synagogue, 33 Abbey Road, London  NW8 OAT (followed by a reception)


If you wish to attend, please email : office@newlondon.org.uk
Tel: 0207 328 1026     office@newlondon.org.uk     www.newlondon.org.uk


The lecture analyses a cuneiform document recording a murder trial of c.1800 BCE. The text is short, but its many twists and turns reveal a fascinating insight into an aristocratic Babylonian family

 Professor Michalowski the George G. Cameron Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations at the University of Michigan specializing in the Sumerian and Babylonian literature, languages, history, economics and poetics.  He is also is the editor of the Journal of Cuneiform Studies and President of the International Association of
Assyriologists.

Descriptive grammar of Sumerian: new e-thesis

Bram Jagersma's 2010 PhD thesis "A descriptive grammar of Sumerian" has been made available as an e-thesis by Leiden University.
Click here to access the link from the SOAS Library catalogue

Egyptian "Book of the Dead" : video

The latest major exhibition at the British Museum showcases the museum's collection of  Ancient Egyptian "Books of the Dead" - a rare and very fragile collection of spells on papyrus scrolls which were designed to guide the dead safely into eternal life.

The exhibition will include the longest Book of the Dead in the world, the Greenfield Papyrus, which is 37 metres long and has never been shown publicly in its entirety before.

John Taylor, the curator, introduces the exhibition in this short BBC video

The exhibition runs until 6th March 2011. Click here for further details and admission prices.

More on the "Aural Akkadian" project

Read an interview with SOAS's Martin Worthington about the "Aural Akkadian" project  from the Chronicle of Higher Education blog 
The project website - containing readings from Babylonian and Assyrian literature - is at  www.speechisfire.com

Historiae: an open access journal on ancient history

Historiae 

Click on the above link to read this open-access journal on ancient history (with a strong focus on the Ancient Near East) published by the the Universidad de la Rioja (Spain).

Volumes 1 (2004) to Volume 6 (2009) are available for free download. Browse by author to download individual articles. The articles are primarily in Spanish, with some material in other European languages.

Volume 7 (2010) will also shortly be released as open access content

Book review: Beyond the Qumran community

Review of John Collins' "Beyond the Qumran community: the Sectarian Movement of the Dead Sea Scrolls" by Alex Jassen (University of Minnesota) in the H-Judaic pages of H-Net Online ("an international consortium of scholars and teachers")

Collins argues in support of the theory that the Khirbet Qumran site is a sectarian settlement. Jassen states that the book "advances considerably our understanding of the origins and identities of the communities of the Dead Sea Scrolls"

Find "Beyond the Qumran community" in SOAS Library at QI296.815 / 733599 (Level C, Stacks 95-96)

"Visible language" - exhibition and book

New York Times article on the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago's latest exhibition "Visible language : inventions of writing in the ancient Middle East and beyond" - looking at the evolution of writing in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica.

The "book of the exhibition" is on order for SOAS Library, but it is already available as a free open-access text. Go to the library catalogue entry and click on the link to download and view this book.

Ancient Near East Seminar series 2010

Ancient Near East Seminar Series on LITERATURES OF THE
ANCIENT NEAR EAST


Autumn term seminars take place in Room G51 (College Buildings, Russell Square) at 6 p.m. on the following Mondays

25 October
Yoram Cohen (Tel Aviv): “Where is Bazi? Where is Zizi?” The Ballad of
Early Rulers and the Mari Rulers in the Sumerian King List

15 November
Mauro Giorgieri (Pavia): The Songs and the Scribes: the Role and
Significance of Hurrian Literature in the Cultures of the Ancient Near
East

29 November
Robert Hawley (CNRS, Paris): The Earliest Known Alphabetic Literature:
Structure and Content of the Ugaritic Literary and Scholarly Tradition

13 December
Ian Rutherford (Reading) Near Eastern Literature and Greece: Contact
or Coincidence?

Scribes in Mesopotamia: YouTube video

Click to hear Theo van den Hout (Professor of Hittite and Anatolian languages) at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, talk about early Mesopotamian scribes

Listen to ancient Babylonian and Assyrian poetry

Babylonian and Assyrian Poetry and Literature:  An Archive of Recordings (Aural Akkadian)
This website collects recordings of modern Assyriologists reading ancient Babylonian and Assyrian poetry and literature aloud in the original language. The project is coordinated by Martin Worthington of SOAS's Department of the Near and Middle East and includes excepts from, among other works, the Codex Hammurabi, the Epic of Gilgamesh and Ishtar's Descent to the Netherworld
You may have to download an additional font (Steve Tinney's Ungkam font) to view the transcriptions correctly. This is available free from http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/user/fonts/ 

Open Access journals in Ancient Studies

 700 open access journals on all aspects of the ancient world (including Africa, South Asia and the Middle East, and Hebraic studies as well as the "Ancient Near East") are currently available through this alphabetical list on the AWOL (Ancient World Online blog) from the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University
Click here to link to the AWOL blog and keep up to date with new open access journals online and newly released networked content on the Ancient World

Index to archaeological sites in Israel

This A-Z cumulative index of Archaeological Sites in Israel is from the website of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Click to view descriptions and photographs of sites and discoveries from Akko to Zippori

Welcome to SOAS

Welcome to all new and returning students

The Ancient Near East Library blog will give

• details of information skills training offered by Library staff
• Library updates
• details of new web resources and recommended websites
• and lots more !!

If you have not been on a Library tour yet, there are more tours running next week on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at 1 p.m., 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. 

The tours start from open area at the top of the stairs on the 3rd Floor of the School Building (near "Library Tours Start Here" sign !!)

Library training sessions run throughout the year. There will be general introductory sessions on a variety of topics during the first few weeks of term. 

Pick up a handout at the Enquiry Desk for further details of our introductory sessions - Getting started, Electronic journals and bibliographic databases, and Beyond Google: using the Internet for research

For further information on the Library and Library resources, go to the main Library website or go to the Information Skills section on the BLE

As your Librarian, I will be here to help. You can contact me on ms28@soas.ac.uk  or drop in to Room C3 in the Library

QSB books (Coptic & Coptic Church)

Books on the Coptic Church and the Coptic language (classmark QSB) have been returned from off-site storage and are temporarily located in Room C3 of the Library (Teaching and Research Support Office). If you need to consult them, please come to Room C3 during office hours (9-5) or make a request to Mary Seeley (ms28@soas.ac.uk)

Please note that L.QSB ("large size") books remain off-site

Diplomacy in the Ancient Near East

On September 7th, the USA returned to Iraq 100s of historic objects that had "found their way" to America over the last 10 years, including a headless statue of King Enmetena of Lagash, looted from Baghdad Museum in 2003 and returned to the Iraqi ambassador in 2006

For the full story, go to the History News Network (HNN) website

To read more about King Enmetena and diplomacy in the ancient Near East, try Amanda Podany's book "Brotherhood of kings : how international relations shaped the ancient Near East" at QB327 / 733075

New from SOAS Research Online

Daniel Schwemmer's "Gauging the Influence of Babylonian magic ..."  (full details below) is newly available from SOAS Research Online


Schwemer, Daniel 'Gauging the Influence of Babylonian Magic: the Reception of Mesopotamian Traditions in Hittite Ritual Practice.' In: Cancik-Kirschbaum, Eva and Klinger, Jörg and Müller, Gerfrid, (eds.), Proceedings of: Internationales Symposium “Normierung und Emanzipation: Bausteine für eine Kulturgeschichte des 2. Jts. v. Chr. im Alten Orient”, Berlin 29.–30. Januar 2010. FU Berlin. (Submitted)

Welcome to the SOAS Library Ancient Near East blog

This blog will contain information about and resources for the Ancient Near East collection at SOAS Library.

It will include

• details of information skills training offered by Library staff
• Library updates
• details of new web resources and recommended websites
• and lots more!