From Handaxe to Khan - Essays Presented to Peder Mortensen on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday

Nimrud is an exceptionally generous site, and has richly rewarded those that work there. It was first famous for the Assyrian bas reliefs found by the 19th century archaeologist, Austen Henry Layard, but is also famous for the thousands of ivories found during the 19th and 20th centuries. The ivories were mostly imported from the Levantine kingdoms to the west, either as tribute or booty, although there were some in the distinctive local Assyrian style. They were used to embellish furniture, as well as small objects, and are carved in a great variety of styles, but interestingly with a relatively limited repertoire of subjects. Their time of manufacture probably dates to the early centuries of the first millennium BCE, although their archaeological context is dated by the fall of the Assyrian empire in 614-612 BCE. This publication is a supplement to the volumes already published, which catalogue the ivories, and instead presents scans from the original photographs, where possible, of the ivories from Fort Shalmaneser, which have been published in the first five volumes, so that scholars can select and rearrange ivories as appropriate. In this way, the next generation of work involving deeper stylistic and analytic studies by a range of scholars asking different questions may be undertaken.

Tell Brak in Syria is one of the largest and most important multi-period sites in northern Mesopotamia. Excavations in 1994-1996 cast new light on everyday life at the settlement through several phases of occupation from the early 4th millennium BC to the 2nd millennium BC. Volume 4 in the Tell Brak Monograph series provides an account of the architecture, artefacts, and environmental evidence, supported by a program of radiocarbon dating. The results emphasize the indigenous nature of cultural development in Upper Mesopotamia during these millennia. Among the highlights are a small temple dating to the Ninevite 5 period (earlier 3rd millennium BC), which provides new insights into a phenomenon that has hitherto been little explored; and an exceptional hoard of precious materials and artefacts that underlines the importance of Tell Brak in the later 3rd millennium BC. The report is completed by studies of subsistence, diet, economy, use of space, and craft activities, which focus on the variabilities and continuities in daily life that underlay the shifting political and cultural forces. These studies highlight the unique position of Tell Brak in the long-term ebb and flow of regional interactions across Mesopotamia.

Raised to honour Maussolos, a Persian satrap of the 4th century BCE, the Maussolleion in Halikarnassos was renowned throughout the ancient world as one of its Seven Wonders. Pliny the Elder provided a useful description of it several centuries later, but another fourteen passed before the invention of moveable type made his observations available to a wider public. In Volume 5, Jeppesen tries to reconcile Pliny's account of the superstructure with recent archaeological finds. The passage in Pliny's Natural History has been corrupted by untold generations of copyists, and reconstructions have focused on producing a grammatically acceptable text, with little regard for consistency and sense. Jeppesen compares variant readings from the 58 known manuscripts and proposes a model that tallies with the new archaeological evidence. The volume concludes with a survey of the architectural fragments held by the British Museum and the Maussolleion Museum in Bodrum.

This volume is a study of selected ceramic finds from the Maussolleion site and the first major publication on Karian pottery since 1965. From a body of 120,000 items, the authors have emphasised in situ contexts related to the construction of the Maussolleion, and representative items from the large body of Hellenistic material.

Sir Aurel Stein (1862-1943) is renowned for his archaeological expeditions to Central Asia, India, Iran, Iraq and Jordan. The mass of books and correspondence that he collected during his lifetime are distributed among collections in Britain and his homeland of Hungary. Within the collection bequeathed to the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences is a unique source of material including photographs, letters, documents, manuscripts, articles, offprints and reviews within the subjects of Indology, Iranian studies, Central Asian linguistics and archaeology and Oriental manuscripts. This important collection is discussed and presented here.

This volume details Jan Zahle's investigations of subterranean structures close to the Maussolleion. Successive spoilations -- including Newton's -- have greatly muddled the archaeological record, and the Danish excavations uncovered evidence of another complication: plans for the site appear to have changed during construction, so what was originally intended as a modest extension of the existing structures evolves into a huge tomb on an immense terrace. Zahle's thorough sifting of evidence resolves many contradictions, though uncertainties still remain.

This monograph presents the revolutionary results of ten years of excavation and research in the Neolithic village of Sha'ar Hagolan, Jordan Valley, Israel. Sha'ar Hagolan is dated to the Pottery Neolithic period and is the type-site for the Yarmukian culture, which occupied large parts of the Mediterranean climatic zones of Israel, Jordan and Lebanon during the sixth millennium BC. Recent excavations at the site have far-reaching implications for the entire Neolithic period, as well as for the history of agriculture, art and cult and other aspects of material culture in the ancient Near East. The evidence for the architecture and village planning, material culture and remarkable art objects shows what was previously considered to be an era of decline was a time of cultural evolution and development in the Levant.

Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, located in the Dead Sea Rift valley, is one of the oldest non-African sites to have yielded evidence for the activities of groups of hominin hunter-gatherers. The excavations recovered thousands of Acheulian period stone tools and animal bones that had accumulated in and around an ancient lake about 780, 000 years ago. The deposits have remained waterlogged virtually ever since, and this unusual circumstance resulted in the preservation of plant macrofossils, including pieces of wood and bark that can be identified to the level of individual plant species. Most of the pieces probably accumulated naturally around the lake, but a few show signs of hominin modification - making them the oldest wooden artefacts yet discovered. The unique contribution of the Gesher Benot Ya'aqov palaeobotanical assemblage, however, lies in its value for the palaeoenvironmental reconstruction of a pre-agricultural age - an age that predates changes induced by intensive human activity. This monograph describes the geological and archaeological context of the ancient wood, the criteria for its identification, and its implications for the woods surrounding Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in Lower to Middle Pleistocene times. They include detailed descriptions of the different wood taxa, discuss the present habitats of the identified species, and consider the possible mechanisms by which the wood was deposited. They also provide a survey of the wood fragments that have occasionally been found at other ancient Palaeolithic sites. This volume is the first in a series of monographs which will focus on different aspects of the multidisciplinary investigations at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov.

The late 4th millennium in South Mesopotamia is universally known as the Uruk Period because it is at Uruk that the German excavations have exposed the most remarkable manifestations of this complex society. Although the Uruk period in Iraq itself remains little understood, in recent decades artefacts and entire settlements have been discovered in places as far apart as the Mahi Dasht in Iran and the Euphrates in South-eastern Turkey. This volume attempts to track the Uruk phenomenon in the Near East, bringing together research on some of the most significant individual sites within the Levant and Egypt, placing emphasis on the artefactual evidence. The eleven papers were originally presented at a conference in Manchester in 1998. The contributors are Hans Nissen, Renate Gut, Mitchell Rothman, Virginia Badler, Joan Oates, Marcella Frangipane, Gil Stein, Fiona Stephen, Edgar Peltenburg, Govert van Driel, Graham Philip and Toby Wilkinson.

Luristan in Western Iran was largely inaccessible to foreigners until the early 1960s when a new road linking the Great Khorasan Road with Susiana or Elam was built by the Danish engineering firm, Kampsax. This volume presents the settlement and tombs and graves of the centuries around 1000 BC, and includes identifications of animal and human remains, and teeth found there.

The initial aim of the Danish archaeological campaigns in Bahrain was to look for settlements contemporary with the "Hundred Thousand Gravemounds". After the first few campaigns it was evident, however, that the island was such a rich archaeological field that investigation of all periods from the earliest flint-using culture to the later Islamic world was called for. Among the Islamic remains was an exceptionally fine collection of Early Islamic pottery and glass recovered from the rubbish which filled up a well at the Barbar site where a temple from around 2000BC was excavated. These remains are published in this volume along with finds from the Islamic settlement at the Qala'a mound, especially the Islamic Fortress.

Tell Brak, ancient Nagar, was one of the most important cities in northern Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC and a focus of long-distance trade. It was also, for about a century, a provincial capital of the Akkadian Empire founded by Sargon of Agade. This is the second of four volumes on the 1976-93 excavations at Tell Brak. The construction level of Naram-Sin's Palace, discovered by Mallowan in the 1930s, has been used as a point of chronological reference to provide the first well-dated corpus of archaeological material in northern Mesopotamia belonging to the second half of the third millennium. The major Akkadian buildings at Tell Brak are the first well-preserved examples to be discovered at any site, and include a great ceremonial complex and a unique caravanserai that housed the donkey caravans bringing metals from Anatolia. During the ritual closure of these buildings beautiful silver jewellery was deposited, along with numerous copper/bronze tools and the skeletons of some of the caravan donkeys. Specialist reports provide detailed historical, geomorphological, ceramic, faunal, botanical, microstratigraphic and other data.

This first volume in a series of works on Tell Kosak Shamali focuses on the Chalcolithic deposits at the site, or the Ubaid period. Located on the east bank of the Euphrates the site held an important strategic position and one which had a diverse set of resources available. Investigated since the 1980s and most recently by the University of Tokyo, this volume reports on the results of the excavations, detailing the geographical and cultural setting of the site, the architecture and stratigraphy, the radiocarbon dates, the nature of the finds and the history of the site in the Palaeolithic, Neolithic and Chalcolithic. Evidence from Kosak Shamali provides important insights into the transition from Neolithic agrarian societies to more complex, increasingly urban societies of the Chalcolithic.

In 1952 in one wing of the North-West Palace at Nimrud, ancient Kalhu, Max Mallowan excavated an archive room containing royal correspondence from the reigns of Tiglath-pileser III and Sargon II of Assyria. Subjects include Assyrian military activity in Babylonia and on the northern frontier, royal building projects, events on the Phoenician seaboard, and relations with King Midas of Phrygia. Some texts were published in Iraq between 1955 and 1974; the majority have remained unpublished until now. Two hundred and forty-three texts are published here; most are in New Assyrian script and the remainder in New Babylonian. Chapters divide the tablets into the geographical areas they are concerned with. The texts are presented with transliterations, translation and notes. Plates at the end of the book give facsimiles of the tablets.

In the early 1990s the University of Cambridge reopened excavations at the Neolithic site of Catalhöyuek in central Turkey, abandoned since the 1960s. In this volume, Ian Hodder explains his vision of archaeological excavation, where careful examination of context and an awareness of human bias allows researches exciting new insights into prehistoric cognition. The aim of the volume is to discuss some of the reflexive or postprocessual methods that have been introduced at the site in the work there since 1993. These methods involve reflexivity, interactivity, multivocality and contextuality or relationality.