Author: Olivier Binst Publisher: Konemann ISBN: 9783829004954 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 319
Book Description
" ... about the archaeology of the Levant, which here means more specifically the region east of the Mediterranean between Turkey in the north and Egypt in the west ... the historical and once greater Syria ..."--Page 7.
Author: Philip Mansel Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300176228 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 497
Book Description
Not so long ago, in certain cities on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived and flourished side by side. What can the histories of these cities tell us? Levant is a book of cities. It describes three former centers of great wealth, pleasure, and freedom—Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut—cities of the Levant region along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. In these key ports at the crossroads of East and West, against all expectations, cosmopolitanism and nationalism flourished simultaneously. People freely switched identities and languages, released from the prisons of religion and nationality. Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived and worshipped as neighbors.Distinguished historian Philip Mansel is the first to recount the colorful, contradictory histories of Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut in the modern age. He begins in the early days of the French alliance with the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century and continues through the cities' mid-twentieth-century fates: Smyrna burned; Alexandria Egyptianized; Beirut lacerated by civil war.Mansel looks back to discern what these remarkable Levantine cities were like, how they differed from other cities, why they shone forth as cultural beacons. He also embarks on a quest: to discover whether, as often claimed, these cities were truly cosmopolitan, possessing the elixir of coexistence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews for which the world yearns. Or, below the glittering surface, were they volcanoes waiting to erupt, as the catastrophes of the twentieth century suggest? In the pages of the past, Mansel finds important messages for the fractured world of today.
Author: Assaf Yasur-Landau Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108668240 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 941
Book Description
The volume offers a comprehensive introduction to the archaeology of the southern Levant (modern day Israel, Palestine and Jordan) from the Paleolithic period to the Islamic era, presenting the past with chronological changes from hunter-gatherers to empires. Written by an international team of scholars in the fields of archaeology, epigraphy, and bioanthropology, the volume presents central debates around a range of archaeological issues, including gender, ritual, the creation of alphabets and early writing, biblical periods, archaeometallurgy, looting, and maritime trade. Collectively, the essays also engage diverse theoretical approaches to demonstrate the multi-vocal nature of studying the past. Significantly, The Social Archaeology of the Levant updates and contextualizes major shifts in archaeological interpretation.
Author: Micheline R. Ishay Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300249225 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 349
Book Description
A surprisingly hopeful assessment of the prospects for human rights in the Middle East, and a blueprint for advancing them The enormous sense of optimism unleashed by the Arab Spring in 2011 soon gave way to widespread suffering and despair. Of the many popular uprisings against autocratic regimes, Tunisia’s now stands alone as a beacon of hope for sustainable human rights progress. Libya is a failed state; Egypt returned to military dictatorship; the Gulf States suppressed popular protests and tightened control; and Syria and Yemen are ravaged by civil war. Challenging the widely shared pessimism among regional experts, Micheline Ishay charts bold and realistic pathways for human rights in a region beset by political repression, economic distress, sectarian conflict, a refugee crisis, and violence against women. With due attention to how patterns of revolution and counterrevolution play out in different societies and historical contexts, Ishay reveals the progressive potential of subterranean human rights forces and offers strategies for transforming current realities in the Middle East.
Author: Yehouda Enzel Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1316841847 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 789
Book Description
Quaternary of the Levant presents up-to-date research achievements from a region that displays unique interactions between the climate, the environment and human evolution. Focusing on southeast Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Israel, it brings together over eighty contributions from leading researchers to review 2.5 million years of environmental change and human cultural evolution. Information from prehistoric sites and palaeoanthropological studies contributing to our understanding of 'out of Africa' migrations, Neanderthals, cultures of modern humans, and the origins of agriculture are assessed within the context of glacial-interglacial cycles, marine isotope cycles, plate tectonics, geochronology, geomorphology, palaeoecology and genetics. Complemented by overview summaries that draw together the findings of each chapter, the resulting coverage is wide-ranging and cohesive. The cross-disciplinary nature of the volume makes it an invaluable resource for academics and advanced students of Quaternary science and human prehistory, as well as being an important reference for archaeologists working in the region.
Author: Margreet L. Steiner Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191662550 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 912
Book Description
This Handbook aims to serve as a research guide to the archaeology of the Levant, an area situated at the crossroads of the ancient world that linked the eastern Mediterranean, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. The Levant as used here is a historical geographical term referring to a large area which today comprises the modern states of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, western Syria, and Cyprus, as well as the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula. Unique in its treatment of the entire region, it offers a comprehensive overview and analysis of the current state of the archaeology of the Levant within its larger cultural, historical, and socio-economic contexts. The Handbook also attempts to bridge the modern scholarly and political divide between archaeologists working in this highly contested region. Written by leading international scholars in the field, it focuses chronologically on the Neolithic through Persian periods - a time span during which the Levant was often in close contact with the imperial powers of Egypt, Anatolia, Assyria, Babylon, and Persia. This volume will serve as an invaluable reference work for those interested in a contextualised archaeological account of this region, beginning with the 'agricultural revolution' until the conquest of Alexander the Great that marked the end of the Persian period.
Author: James A. Fraser Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351375423 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 557
Book Description
When Western explorers first encountered dolmens in the Levant, they thought they had discovered the origins of a megalithic phenomenon that spread as far as the Atlantic coast. Although European dolmens are now considered an unrelated tradition, many researchers continue to approach dolmens in the Levant as part of a trans-regional phenomenon that spanned the Taurus mountains to the Arabian peninsula. By tightly defining the term 'dolmen' itself, this book brings these mysterious monuments into sharper focus. Drawing on historical, archaeological and geological sources, it is shown that dolmens in the Levant mostly concentrate in the eastern escarpment of the Jordan Rift Valley, and in the Galilean hills. They cluster near proto-urban settlements of the Early Bronze I period (3700–3000 BCE) in particular geological zones suitable for the extraction of megalithic slabs. Rather than approaching dolmens as a regional phenomenon, this book considers dolmens as part of a local burial tradition whose tomb forms varied depending on geological constraints. Dolmens in the Levant is essential for anyone interested in the rise of civilisations in the ancient Middle East, and particularly those who have wondered at the origins of these enigmatic burial monuments that dominate the landscape.
Author: Raphael Greenberg Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1107111463 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 433
Book Description
An up-to-date, systematic depiction of Bronze Age societies of the Levant, their evolution, and their interactions and entanglements with neighboring regions.
Author: Rainer Albertz Publisher: Penn State Press ISBN: 1575066688 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 717
Book Description
During the past several decades, family and household religion has become a topic of Old Testament scholarship in its own right, fed by what were initially three distinct approaches: the religious-historical approach, the gender-oriented approach, and the archaeological approach. The first pursues answers to questions of the commonality and difference between varieties of family religion and describes the household and family religions of Mesopotamia, Syria/Ugarit, Israel, Philistia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Gender-oriented approaches also contribute uniquely important insights to family and household religion. Pioneers of this sort of investigation show that, although women in ancient Israelite societies were very restricted in their participation in the official cult, there were familial rituals performed in domestic environments in which women played prominent roles, especially as related to fertility, childbirth, and food preparation. Archaeologists have worked to illuminate many aspects of this family religion as enacted by and related to the nuclear family unit and have found evidence that domestic cults were more important in Israel than has previously been understood. One might even conceive of every family as having actively partaken in ritual activities within its domestic environment. Family and Household Religion in Ancient Israel and the Levant analyzes the appropriateness of the combined term family and household religion and identifies the types of family that existed in ancient Israel on the basis of both literary and archaeological evidence. Comparative evidence from Iron Age Philistia, Transjordan, Syria, and Phoenicia is presented. This monumental book presents a typology of cult places that extends from domestic cults to local sanctuaries and state temples. It details family religious beliefs as expressed in the almost 3,000 individual Hebrew personal names that have so far been recorded in epigraphic and biblical material. The Hebrew onomasticon is further compared with 1,400 Ammonite, Moabite, Aramean, and Phoenician names. These data encompass the vast majority of known Hebrew personal names and a substantial sample of the names from surrounding cultures. In this impressive compilation of evidence, the authors describe the variety of rites performed by families at home, at a neighborhood shrine, or at work. Burial rituals and the ritual care for the dead are examined. A comprehensive bibliography, extensive appendixes, and several helpful indexes round out the masterful textual material to form a one-volume compendium that no scholar of ancient Israelite religion and archaeology can afford not to own.
Author: Ofer Bar-Yosef Publisher: Berghahn Books ISBN: 1789201578 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 737
Book Description
This large volume presents virtually all aspects of the Epipalaeolithic Natufian culture in a series of chapters that cover recent results of field work, analyses of materials and sites, and synthetic or interpretive overviews of various aspects of this important prehistoric culture.
Author: Olivier Binst
Author: Philip Mansel
Author: Assaf Yasur-Landau
Author: Micheline R. Ishay
Author: Yehouda Enzel
Author: Margreet L. Steiner
Author: James A. Fraser
Author: Raphael Greenberg
Author: Rainer Albertz
Author: Ofer Bar-Yosef