bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Christians at Nineveh in Late Antiquity
Authors: Simpson St J. 
Published: August 2016

The mound of Kuyunjik contains the longest known archaeological sequence of occupation in Mesopotamia, spanning all periods from the sixth millennium BC until at least the thirteenth century AD. The prehistoric periods have been comprehensively studied by Gut (1995, 2002) and the general sequence of excavation, occupation and principal architectural finds reviewed by Reade (2000), yet despite a few exceptions (Curtis 1976, 1995; Reade 1998, 1999, 2001; Simpson 1996), the pottery and other finds from the Seleucid period onwards have thus far attracted surprisingly little study. For these periods though, the material culture is characterised by a strong mixture of Classical and Oriental traditions; thus, first-century AD graves contained gold face-coverings and the remains of diadems, both hinting at the eastern extension of practices more commonly found in the eastern Roman provinces, but Western lamps, glassware, ceramics and even a Roman military badge also occur at the site. Some of these betray direct political and military control, whereas others reflect a mixture of imports and local imitations; an appreciation of this rich cultural mix is important for the clearer understanding of Nineveh in Late Antiquity.Nineveh almost certainly held a Roman garrison at the extreme eastern limit of its empire but following the humiliation of the apostate Julian's Mesopotamian campaign of 363, it must have been ceded as part of the handover of five trans-Tigridian Roman provinces containing Nisibis, Singara, Castra Maurorum and fifteen unnamed forts to Shapur II (309–379). Thereafter the material culture from Nineveh finally acquires an Iranian character and, until its capture in 637/38 or 641/42 by an Arab army generally believed to have been commanded by ‘Utba bin Farqad, it flourished as a Sasanian town, bridgehead and fortress on the east bank of the Tigris (cf. Robinson 2000, 36–7). The datable finds of this period include four hoards of silver and bronze coins (Simpson 1996, 95–6); several personal seals, bullae and elaborate cutlery of Sasanian type (Simpson 1996, 97–8; 2003, 362–3, Fig. 3); a range of plain, mould-blown and cut glass (Simpson 2005); and four helmets, the latter hinting at the military component of the settlement referred to in the Arab sources (Simpson forthcoming, b).
The backs of some sealings from Nineveh 5
Authors: Charvát Petr 
Published: August 2016

In 1930 to 1931, the British Museum expedition to Nineveh included among its activities there a stratigraphical sounding which resulted in the establishment of a sequence of prehistoric and early historic remains in northern Mesopotamia over a considerable chronological period (on the deep sounding of Nineveh see now Gut 1995; Gut 2002, esp. pp. 17–22, and also Gut 1999). This sequence, comprising five broadly defined phases, extends from the Neolithic (Ninevite 1) to the early third millennium BC (Ninevite 5).In 1989 I had the opportunity to study archaeological materials deposited in the British Museum in London. I was interested in the earliest Mesopotamian sealings — those of Tell Arpachiyah and Nineveh — and was provided not only with Ninevite 2–3 sealings which I had requested, but also with those of Ninevite 5, so I documented the latter as well. After publishing the Ninevite 2–3 items (Charvát 1994), I had no opportunity to publish the remainder.However, in 2001 Dominique Collon published an analysis of the seal impressions found in the Ninevite 5 archaeological strata documented by the Thompson and Mallowan expedition (Collon 2001; see also Collon 2003). When “Nineveh” was announced as the theme of the 49e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, I decided to present a paper on the detailed information I had recorded for a number of the backs of the sealings studied by Collon. My work builds upon Collon's art-historical analysis of the obverse of the sealings, but here I am concentrating on the “hidden faces” of the seal impressions in order to extend my study of the character of socially engineered exchange practices in the protohistorical period of early Mesopotamia.
The conquest of the holy city of Nineveh and the kingdom of Nurrugûm by Samsî-Addu
Authors: Ziegler Nele 
Published: August 2016

To speak about Nineveh from the perspective of the archives of Mari may seem rash: the Middle Euphrates is a long way from the banks of the Tigris. Yet the importance of Nineveh and its shrine was such that several texts found at Mari mention it as what must then have been a religious metropolis.During the period when Mari was under the dominion of Samsî-Addu, his son, Yasmah-Addu, sat on its throne. He was primarily responsible for affairs in the west, but personally participated in the military campaign marked by the fall of Nineveh and received numerous letters informing him of military events related to this event. Even after the conquest of Mari, when Yasmah-Addu had left the area, news of Nineveh and its surroundings went on arriving at the capital of the Middle Euphrates and continued to do so more sporadically in the era of Zimrî-Lîm.I would like first to present the data relevant to the geography and toponymy of the kingdom of Nurrugûm, to which Nineveh belonged at that time, and then to reconstruct the campaign that led to the fall of Nineveh and the complete annexation of the kingdom. I will end with some remarks on the famous commemorative inscription placed by Samsî-Addu in the temple Emenue at Nineveh.
The “Sin of Sargon” and Esarhaddon's Reconception of Sennacherib: A study in divine will, human politics and royal ideology
Authors: Weaver Ann M. 
Published: August 2016

According to his inscriptions, Sennacherib, king of Assyria, conquered and razed the city of Babylon in 689 BCE. Previous Neo-Assyrian monarchs had employed a variety of strategies while attempting to deal with what Machinist has dubbed their “Babylonian Problem”. None of these previous tactics, however, approached the level of violence and destruction evidenced in Sennacherib's own descriptions of this campaign. Indeed, as elaborated by Brinkman, the Neo-Assyrian court traditionally venerated Babylonian culture.Machinist's interpretation, while not dismissing the unprecedented destructiveness of Sennacherib's actions, positions these actions in the context of a larger struggle faced by all the Sargonid monarchs, the struggle of maintaining sovreignty over Babylonia while honoring its religious and cultural traditions. However, such an utter devastation of Babylon, its treatment as one of Assyria's many other de-cultured vassals, is disparate enough from the actions of Sennacherib's predecessors so as to place his son and successor, Esarhaddon, in a difficult position with respect to Babylon and the Babylonian population.Esarhaddon's decision to abandon his father's extreme tactics and adopt a primarily peaceful policy, comparable in aspects to those of the earlier Neo-Assyrian monarchs, was therefore a risky one. It is, however, a decision he stands by and justifies through many of the compositions produced during his reign. In the wake of the destruction and de-culturation in the service of Assyrian hegemony wreaked by his father, Esarhaddon designs a policy toward Babylonia based on construction and acculturation that influences and affects the cultures of both Assyria and Babylonia.
The “Underworld Vision” of the Ninevite intellectual milieu
Authors: Ataç Mehmet-Ali 
Published: August 2016

The Assyrian Netherworld is often depicted in literature as a grim “hell” whose residents are clad like birds, deprived of light, and have soil and clay as their food and sustenance. It is the land of no return, erṣet la târi, “the house which none who enters ever leaves”, reached by a “path that allows no journey back”. In addition to such a dreary “hell,” however, the Assyrian Netherworld should also be understood in its capacity as a locus of initiation to which the hero or the spiritual adept is able to pay a visit while still alive without being permanently engulfed by it, and as a result attains a superior level of consciousness, perhaps even immortality.This paper focuses on such initiatic aspects of the Netherworld. Especially two poems composed in the Standard Babylonian dialect of Akkadian, the Standard Babylonian Version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a work long ingrained in the Mesopotamian religious consciousness, and the poem known as the Underworld Vision of an Assyrian Prince, may be thought to shed light on this more covert perception of the Netherworld. Further, since both of these works come from “libraries” in Nineveh, they may after all be thought to reflect the way the Ninevite intellectual elite themselves perceived the Netherworld. This “Underworld Vision” of the Ninevite scholarly milieu is by no means confined to contemporary literature; it is also visible in the royal palaces of Nineveh through representations of gate-guardians, Mischwesen, that belong to that very Netherworld. Nor is this “Underworld Vision” exclusive to the Ninevite elite alone, as it is one which the latter inherited from a long-standing Mesopotamian mystical tradition. Here, however, I shall try to present a glimpse of this Netherworld from a Ninevite perspective.
Layard's description of rooms in the Southwest Palace at Nineveh
Authors: Russell John Malcolm 
Published: August 2016

The “Palace without Rival” at Nineveh, built by the Neo-Assyrian king Sennacherib (704–681 BC), was excavated by Austen Henry Layard in two campaigns in the mid-nineteenth century. The results of the first campaign, in May and June 1847, were published in considerable detail in Nineveh and its Remains (1849). The results of the second, from October 1849 to April 1851, were reported in less detail in Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (1853).Among the Layard Papers in the British Library are the unpublished notes that served as the basis for the published reports. The notes for the first campaign, in Add. Ms. 39076, fol. 43–54, are in the form of a full narrative account, penned in Layard's best hand. The notes for the second campaign are preserved in two versions. The earlier is a rough incomplete account in two of Layard's pocket notebooks. The first covers the period 17 October to 13 November 1850 (Add. Ms. 39089C, fol. 6–12) and includes notes on Rooms E, I to S, V, Y, and DD (the latter mistakenly labelled “FF” in the notebook). The second notebook, which covers 5 December 1850 to 26 April 1851 (Add. Ms. 39089E, fol. 29v–34v), records Rooms GG, II to LL, part of MM (mislabelled “PP”), SS to WW, YY, AAA, and DDD to OOO. These are very rough field notes, sketchy and almost illegible. The later set of notes from the second campaign (Add. Ms. 39077, fol. 75r–79v) is more complete, covering Rooms I to OOO, all of the rooms excavated during that campaign. This account, which must have been compiled after the close of the excavation, is apparently based in part on the notes in the pocket notebooks. It includes a number of additional rooms, however — T, U, W, X, Z, AA, BB, CC, EE, FF, MM (full description), NN to RR, XX, BBB, and CCC — and therefore it may also have drawn on field notes that have not yet been identified. Unlike the field notes, it is written fairly legibly and in complete sentences, in the same manner as the report of the first campaign.
Diet in Mesopotamia: The Evidence of the Barley Ration Texts (c. 3000–1400 B.C.)
Authors: Ellison Rosemary 
Published: August 2016

In order to live one must eat and if one is to live a full and active life the food that is eaten must supply all the nutrients required to maintain the body in a healthy state. An appreciation of the importance of diet has led to many modern studies in this field. The methods used include an examination of the environment of the country concerned; of its economic basis—for example whether it is mainly an agricultural or an industrial country, what food is available and whether such food is locally grown or imported; dietary surveys, usually at family level, of the food intake of the population and clinical studies to assess the health of the individual. The information gained in these surveys is used to assess the adequacy of the nutritional intake of the population. It has proved difficult to set up an accepted standard by which to judge adequacy of diet, but the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations has produced tables of recommended daily intakes of nutrients which can be taken as a practical guide.Some of these methods can be applied to ancient Mesopotamia in order to see whether the diet there can be considered adequate. Examination of the palaeoethnobotanical and palaeozoological evidence from excavated sites, together with references in cuneiform texts and representations of plants and animals on cylinder seals and reliefs, give information about the environment and the economic base. This was agriculture with cereals such as barley and wheat as the main crops and sheep, goats, cattle and pigs the main domesticated animals. Clinical studies of individual people are not possible: obviously no one is available for measuring and weighing or to supply blood and urine samples for tests! It may be, however, that the study of skeletal material will in future enable the likely height and weight of a population to be calculated and provide some information about calcium and Vitamin D deficiencies. It is impossible also to carry out the kind of dietary survey in which families are studied and their food weighed before eating so that exact food intake can be calculated. But by studying the botanical and faunal remains, cylinder seals and reliefs, and the cuneiform texts, it is possible to get some idea of the range of food which was available, which foodstuffs were utilized and how, and to a certain extent who ate what.
Part III. Catalogue
Authors: Mallowan M. E. L. 
Published: August 2016

At the end of each successive season, the collections of antiquities discovered at Brak and Chagar Bazar were divided into two parts, one of which was allotted to the Aleppo Museum, Syria, the other to the Expedition. The Aleppo Museum had the priority of selection. Any object marked (S) in the Catalogue was allocated to Aleppo. Of the remainder, the majority of the objects are in the British Museum, London, and smaller collections of antiquities were also sent to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and to the Museum of Archæology and Ethnology, Cambridge. A representative collection of potsherds, a few complete pots, and some of the Eye-Idols were also sent to the London Institute of Archæology.All of the most important objects discovered by the Expedition have been illustrated in the eighty-six Plates of this final publication, or in previous numbers of Iraq. The Eye-Idols and the Golden Frieze from the Eye-Temple have been illustrated in colour in the Illustrated London News, in which short preliminary accounts of each season's work have been published; but obviously the information contained in those articles was only a very brief summary, and in many cases has been modified by subsequent discoveries.
Hittite Hieroglyphic Texts at Aleppo.
Authors: Barnett R. D. 
Published: August 2016

The stele No. 2459 (Plates XIX–XXII) was acquired by the Musee National Syrien d'Alep in 1939, after its existence had been reported by peasants. It lay face downwards in an open field at Jekke, 22 kms. to the east of Azaz, which itself lies 25 kms. to the north of Aleppo (Fig. 8). Excavations were conducted by M. Dunand around the spot where it lay, but revealed nothing except some very simple foundations.It is a tall stele, 1.66 m. high, of grey volcanic basalt. Its shape is that of a half-column, rounded at the top, a form favoured by the Hittites of North Syria for depicting a god or goddess, usually accompanied by a dedicatory inscription. The origin of the shape is not obvious, but the type goes back at least to Babylonian monuments, such as the stele of Hammurabi. The text is unusually perfect, except for a flaw running vertically through the stone. It was perhaps buried in antiquity to preserve it.
Reception Studies and Cultural Reinvention in Aristophanes and Tawfiq Al-Hakim
Authors: Nooter Sarah 
Published: August 2016

We look on the totality of the past as dreams, certainly interesting ones, and regard only the latest state of science as true, and that only provisionally so. This is culture.Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?Reception studies in classics live a complicated scholarly life. On one hand, a healthy collection of new monographs appears on the market every year that shows the strength of this subfield, including such recent additions as Gonda Van Steen's Theatre of the Condemned: Classical Tragedy on Greek Prison Islands and Simon Goldhil's work on the Victorian reception of classics called Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction and the Proclamation of Modernity. Collections of essays that contribute to the field are also copiously produced. Thus two scholars could lately declare that ‘[n]o sub-field in the discipline of Classics has experienced such growth, in both quantitative and qualitative terms, over the past fifteen years or so as the study of reception of classical material’. Charles Martindale, credited with throwing down the receptive gauntlet some twenty years ago, recently wrote an essay on the flourishing state of this subfield within classics, reporting that reception studies have proven classics to be not ‘something fixed, whose boundaries can be shown.’ He adds the following:Many classicists (though by no means the majority) are in consequence reasonably happy, if only to keep the discipline alive in some form, to work with an enlarged sense of what classics might be, no longer confined to the study of classical antiquity ‘in itself’—so that classics can include writing about Paradise Lost, or the mythological poesie of Titian, or the film Gladiator, or the iconography of fascism.
Eros Through the Looking-Glass? Erotic Ekphrasis and Narrative Structure in Moschus' Europa
Authors: Harden S.J. 
Published: August 2016

Moschus' Europa has long been recognised to be a highly visual and pictorial poem. It is also dominated by an erotic theme: the sexual awakening of the maiden Europa and her love affair with Zeus. This article will focus on a connection between erotic theme and highly visual narrative that has received attention in relation to Greek texts from the Roman Empire, but none in relation to Moschus. The sophisticated and self-conscious use of vision and ekphrasis in erotic narrative which has been traced in authors such as Achilles Tatius (in particular by Goldhill) is anticipated, I shall argue, in Moschus' Hellenistic poem. The work done on this theme in Achilles Tatius provides a useful framework for analysing Moschus' treatment of vision and desire and as such, I will refer to the work of Goldhill and Morales where it illuminates my approach to Moschus.The Europa displays a striking combination of erotic theme and ekphrastic style: Moschus uses the motifs and techniques of ekphrasis to explore the erotic gaze, whereby the process of viewing a desirable object becomes the ‘action’ of the plot and ekphrasis transcends its normally digressive or embedded position within the structure of the text and appropriates the very narrative function of the poem. In terms of its visuality and exploration of visual themes, Moschus' Europa differs from Achilles Tatius and from the poetry of his own contemporaries such as the Argonautica, for although other poets often explore similar themes of vision and desire, the form and structure of Moschus' poem set his treatment apart. The Europa is a short poem of 166 lines and it is dominated by visual description: firstly by the ekphrasis of the basket and then by three extended descriptive scenes which, as I argue below, should also be treated as ekphraseis.
Apuleius in Meiji Japan: The Golden Ass as an Educational and Reformatory Novel
Authors: Watanabe Akihiko 
Published: August 2016

This paper will consider the 1887 Japanese translation of Apuleius'Golden Assfrom the angle of classical reception. Although this was the first translation of Greco-Roman literature to appear in modern Japanese, it has, at least in print, never been examined by a classicist before. With the rising interest in the study of classical receptions, including those taking place outside the West, the time may be ripe for a serious look at this early Meiji translation by Morita Shiken—its content, source, intellectual climate surrounding its production, and its own subsequent reception in Japan.The ancient novel, as Whitmarsh observes, is a genre uniquely suited for reception studies, especially of the more usual kind that is concerned with the modern period. Although a late and ignoble genre within antiquity, despite its often considerable linguistic and literary artistry, it came to enjoy relatively wide cultural recognition and circulation in the early modern period, before being outshone by the modern Western novel and sinking back into relative obscurity again both in the public and in academia—and its literary character is still very much controversial, to the extent that it is debated whether the ancient genre may justifiably be called ‘novel’. The history of the reception of the novel therefore may show more intriguing twists and contradictions than that of such established and uncontroversially ‘great’ genres as epic or tragedy.
Bodies, Substances and Kinship in Roman Declamation: The Sick Twins and Their Parents in Pseudo-Quintilian Major Declamations 8
Authors: Bernstein Neil W. 
Published: August 2016

Believe me, good folks, this is not so inconsiderable a thing as many of you may think it;—you have all, I dare say, heard of the animal spirits, as how they are transfused from father to son &c. &c—and a great deal to that purpose:—Well, you may take my word, that nine parts in ten of a man's sense or his nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in this world depend upon their motions and activity, and the different tracts and trains you put them into, so that when they are once set a-going, whether right or wrong, ‘tis not a half-penny matter,—away they go cluttering like hey-go-mad; and by treading the same steps over and over again, they presently make a road of it, as plain and as smooth as a garden-walk, which, when they are once used to, the Devil himself sometimes shall not be able to drive them off it.Claims about the physical substances and the reproductive processes of human bodies underwrite presuppositions about familial identities and roles in many cultures. The claim, for example, that the male is the true parent and the female a mere receptacle becomes part of a brief for justified matricide in Aeschylus'Eumenides(657-673). Roman declaimers often take up the question of whether blood is thicker than water. A would-be adoptive father finds his attempt to adopt a young man criticised as a symptom of the disease of luxury (Sen.Con.2.1), while a foster father finds his argument for retaining his adolescent foster sons rebutted by the birth father's claim that his biological ties are more significant—even though the birth father has not seen the children since he exposed them shortly after birth (Sen.Con.9.3). Depending on the observer, the birth of twins may be viewed as a source of family pride, as evidence of the mother's adultery, or as an abomination.