John of Litharb is a fairly well-known Syriac author from the turn of the seventh-and-eighth centuries, who participated in a robust circle of intellectual Christian theologians, historians and philosophers. Although he is known to have authored several important works, due to the accidents of manuscript transmission, only one very short letter of his was thought...

When a Babylonian and Median coalition put an end to Assyrian domination over the Ancient Near East in the late 7th century BCE, the Babylonian kings set about to revitalize the heartland of their new state, the Neo-Babylonian empire. One of the cities that benefited from this imperial program of rebuilding and land reclamation was...

This talk examines the early history of the instruction manual, focusing on cuneiform texts identified as technical procedures. Addressed to “you” as the grammatical subject, procedures—in Akkadian, nēpešum, from the verb epēšu "to make, compute”— encompassed topics ranging from mathematics, glassmaking, horse-training, perfumery, medicine, and astronomy. Over the course of two millennia, procedures would develop...

Traces of ancient Mesopotamian religion have been discovered by archaeologists working across the modern Middle East—temples and other religious structures, worn by time; small fragments of once-opulent cult statues and temple furnishings; clay tablets inscribed with stories of and hymns to the gods; and mundane records of administrators, concerned with tracking the many cults that...

In the first half of the first millennium BCE, the Neo-Assyrian state forged what Mario Liverani has called the world's "prototype empire". Empires are often associated with imperial peoples: a core population that maintains its distinctiveness and enjoys a privileged position within the imperial structure. Were the Assyrians such a people? The Neo-Assyrian state apparatus...