Mesopotamian chronicles

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Moldovan Family Holy Land Map Collection

Moldovan Family Holy Land Map Collection

The Moldovan family Holy Land Map Collection was built over several decades by Dr. Alfred Moldovan and his family. It consists of 94 discrete maps dating from 1480-1797, printed in 23 distinct locations across Europe. The majority of the maps were printed in the 17th and 18th centuries in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Basel, Lyon, Paris, Rome, Strassburg, Tuebingen, and Venice. There are over fifty cartographers and engravers represented, including Adrichem, Bunting, Calmet, Hole, Mercator, Munster, Ortelius, Visscher, Wit, and Ziegler. It also features the unique surviving copy of Antonio De Angelis’s map of Jerusalem, printed in Rome in 1578. The map, the first view of Jerusalem based on direct observation and a key source for subsequent Holy Land cartography, was discovered by Dr. Moldovan and subsequently published in a study by him in 1983 in an article entitled “The Lost De Angelis Map of Jerusalem, 1578" in The Map Collector vol. 24 (1983), 17-25,
http://www.artwis.com/articles/the-lost-de-angelis-map-of-jerusalem-1578/ )

These digital facsimiles were presented to the Penn Libraries in 2009 by Dr. Alfred Moldovan, one of the world’s foremost Judaica collectors over the last half-century and an expert on the authentici­ty of Jewish ceremonial art. He was born on the East side of New York in 1921 to immigrant, Yiddish-speaking parents.  During World War II, he served in Italy as a Captain and a Radar Officer in the 455th Bom­bardment Group of the Fifteenth Air Force. On returning to the United States, he attend­ed medical school on the G.I. Bill, joined the Communist Party and received permission to fulfill his mobilization service as a fam­ily doctor in East Harlem, which kept him busy for over fifty years.

  Home  |  About |  View the Maps

And see AWOL'S Roundup of Resources on Ancient Geography

Recently Published at Archaeopress: Open Access

Recently Published at Archaeopress: Open Access

Bronze Age Tell Communities in Context – An Exploration Into Culture, Society and the Study of European Prehistory Part 1 – Critique: Europe and the Mediterranean by Tobias L. Kienlin. vi+168 pages; illustrated throughout in colour and black & white.
This study challenges current modelling of Bronze Age tell communities in the Carpathian Basin in terms of the evolution of functionally-differentiated, hierarchical or ‘proto-urban’ society under the influence of Mediterranean palatial centres. It is argued that the narrative strategies employed in mainstream theorising of the ‘Bronze Age’ in terms of inevitable social ‘progress’ sets up an artificial dichotomy with earlier Neolithic groups. The result is a reductionist vision of the Bronze Age past which denies continuity evident in many aspects of life and reduces our understanding of European Bronze Age communities to some weak reflection of foreign-derived social types – be they notorious Hawaiian chiefdoms or Mycenaean palatial rule. In order to justify this view, this study looks broadly in two directions: temporal and spatial. First, it is asked how Late Neolithic tell sites of the Carpathian Basin compare to Bronze Age ones, and if we are entitled to assume structural difference or rather ‘progress’ between both epochs. Second, it is examined if a Mediterranean ‘centre’ in any way can contribute to our understanding of Bronze Age tell communities on the ‘periphery’. It is argued that current Neo-Diffusionism has us essentialise from much richer and diverse evidence of past social and cultural realities. Instead, archaeology is called on to contribute to an understanding of the historically specific expressions of the human condition and human agency, not to reduce past lives to abstract stages on the teleological ladder of social evolution.
This book is also available in paperback, priced £38.00. Click here for more information.

 

Ostentazione di rango e manifestazione del potere agli albori della società micenea by Federica Gonzato. 262 pages; black & white illustrations. Italian text. 4 2012. ISBN 9788876992278.
Le manifestazioni materiali del potere sono una caratteristica fondamentale delle società umane e costituiscono pertanto, per lo studioso delle culture antiche, una delle chiavi di lettura più ricche e promettenti. In questo volume, l’autrice propone una interpretazione delle prime fasi di formazione (XVII-XV secolo a.C.) dell’organizzazione sociale della cultura micenea attraverso l’esame degli attributi di potere (insignia dignitatis) trovati nelle sepolture di questo periodo in Argolide, culla della civiltà micenea in Grecia. Lo sviluppo della realtà micenea precedente la grande fase palaziale del XIV-XIII secolo a.C. viene analizzato da un punto di vista etnoantropologico e storico, introducendo una fondamentale distinzione fra beni di prestigio ed attributi di potere (spesso effimeri e polisemantici, in quanto soggetti ad una continua variazione della nozione di valore), ma ponendo anche attenzione alle storia delle dinamiche sociali e alle strategie per il mantenimento della leadership attraverso la manipolazione di una ideologia di cui gliinsignia dignitatis rappresentano la materializzazione.

 

Site, Artefacts and Landscape Prehistoric Borġ in-Nadur, Malta by Davide Tanasi and Nicholas C. Vella. 450 pages; illustrated throughout in black & white. 3 450. ISBN 9788876992230.
The Bronze Age of the Maltese archipelago has long been overlooked by archaeologists whose attention has mostly been focused on the Late Neolithic temples. This book attempts to understand the islands’ Bronze Age society in the course of the second millennium BC by exploring the history of Borg in-Nadur in south-east Malta. The site of a megalithic temple and re-used in later periods when a fortified settlement was built on the plateau, Borg in-Nadur was visited by travellers and antiquarians in the course of the Early Modern period, and was investigated by archaeologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This collection of essays discusses the early attempts to understand the site, and presents a comprehensive catalogue of the finds that have never been properly published. It also considers the site in its local landscape setting and in its regional south-central Mediterranean context, and explores issues related to past and present public outreach and site management.

 

La necropoli protostorica di Montagna di Caltagirone by Davide Tanasi. 451 pages; illustrated throughout in black & white. 1 2008. ISBN 9788876991158.
Il sito della Montagna di Caltagirone (CT), indagato per la prima volta in modo sistematico da Paolo Orsi nel 1903, rappresenta un importante caso studio per la pre e protostoria siciliana e costituisce un osservatorio privilegiato per un’analisi delle problematiche legate all’interrelazione tra popolazioni autoctone e straniere. Dalla metà del II millennio a.C. fino alla colonizzazione greca, infatti, la Montagna ha svolto un ruolo fondamentale nei fenomeni d’aggregazione della popolazione del territorio calatino. Nell’età del Bronzo Tardo (XIII-XI secolo a.C.), il suo insediamento ha raggiunto il momento di maggiore splendore, con l’impianto della grande necropoli, ponendosi, insieme a Pantalica, come principale centro produttore di cultura della Sicilia Orientale.

 

Found: the Palaeolithic of Qatar Taken from Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 45 (2015) by Julie E. Scott-Jackson, Jeffrey I. Rose, William Scott-Jackson & Faisal al-Naimi. Pages 329–336; colour and black & white illustrations. PSAS.
The seeming lack of evidence for a Palaeolithic presence in Qatar has been enigmatic. This has now changed. Here we report on discoveries made by the PADMAC Unit during 2013/2014 and the far-reaching implications of these findings. Our preliminary analysis of the Qatar lithic assemblages — QSS25, QSS29 (PADMAC Unit collection) and A-group Site I and A-group Site III (Kapel collection) — revealed the presence of large chopping tools and crude ‘Abbevillian’ cores, both indicative of an early stage within the lower Palaeolithic period, while the absence of classic Acheulean hand axes might even suggest a date exceeding one million years. Furthermore, the particular suite of technological traits we identified in Umm Taqa ‘B-group’ Site XXXIV (Kapel collection) lithic assemblage, are characteristic of middle–upper Palaeolithic transitional industries found in the Levant, Nile Valley, and southern Arabia. Hence, we tentatively assign the ‘Taqan’ industry to the upper Palaeolithic. Specific lithics from the QSS32 (PADMAC Unit collection) assemblage, allude to further ‘Taqan’ sites in southern Qatar.

 

Generosity, gift giving, and gift avoiding in southern Oman Taken from Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 45 (2015) by Marielle Risse. Pages 289–296. PSAS.
Gibali (Jibbali/Shahri) is a Modern South Arabian language spoken in the coastal plain and mountains of the Dhofar region of southern Oman. Although there are researchers actively documenting Gibali, there has been little anthropological work on the speakers of this non-written language. Building on nine years of research about, and interactions with, Gibali speakers the author describes the concept of the gift in the Arab, Muslim, tribal culture of Gibali speakers. This article tries to form an appreciation of Gibalis by explaining their understanding of the definition of gifts as well as gift giving, receiving, reciprocating, and avoiding. From the field of gift theory, the author draws on Mauss, Godelier, Bourdieu, Appadurai, and Godbout and Caillé, to create a framework for the ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘why’, and ‘how’ of gifts. From the fields of travel writing and history, examples from Wilfred Thesiger and the memoirs of soldiers from the Dhofar War (1965–1975) are used to provide a historical perspective. The result is an insight into a culture in which gifts are, for the most part, not necessary as there are many limits placed on who can give/receive, the time to give/receive, and the kind of object that is considered a gift. 

 

To See the Invisible Karelian Rock Art by Arsen Faradzhev. iv+19 pages; illustrated throughout in colour and black & white.ISBN 9781784911249.
This contribution considers 25 years of discovery of the possible origins and development of the Rock Art Tradition to create Karelian Rock Art images under the open sky through the analysis of different types of intercessions into the horizontal surface of granite rocks.

Karelian petroglyphs are located-at the eastern bank of the Onega Lake and 300 km to the north, close to the southern bank of the White Sea. One of them, the “New Zalavruga,” was discovered by the expedition of U.Savvateev under the Neolithic cultural layer and sterile sand layer in 1963-1968. This is a great and very rare opportunity to obtain direct dating of the end of the tradition to create Karelian Rock Art images around 5-6 ka ago. Therefore, the task was to find the “Invisible” evidences of the tradition’s origins and development similar to both regions via the different use of context.

And See also here, and here.

Image Database: MédiHAL: Archive ouverte de photographies et d'images scientifiques

MédiHAL: Archive ouverte de photographies et d'images scientifiques

MédiHAL est une archive ouverte qui permet de déposer des données visuelles et sonores (images fixes, vidéos et sons), produites dans le cadre de la recherche scientifique.

Ces données sont stockées dans un dépôt sécurisé, avec copies de sécurité des fichiers et de leurs métadonnées.

Dans l'esprit du mouvement international en faveur du libre accès aux données scientifiques, les médias déposés dans MédiHAL sont accessibles en ligne soit immédiatement après le dépôt, soit après une barrière mobile (qui reste modifiable), dans le respect de la propriété intellectuelle des auteurs.

Comme l'archive ouverte HAL, MédiHAL est fondé sur le dépôt volontaire par les scientifiques (chercheurs, enseignants-chercheurs) et personnels d'accompagnement de l'enseignement supérieur et de la recherche.

MédiHAL, créé et lancée le 3 février 2010, est une réalisation du Centre pour la communication scientifique directe (CCSD) en coopération avec le Centre national pour la numérisation de sources visuelles (CN2SV) du CNRS et avec le soutien du TGE Adonis.

Dans le cadre de la mise en place de l'archivage à long terme des données déposées dans HAL (réalisé par le CCSD dans le cadre des actions d'archivage d'Huma-Num), les données déposées dans MédiHAL (les fichiers et leurs métadonnées) sont archivés à long terme au Centre Informatique National de l’Enseignement Supérieur (CINES) selon les principes du modèle OAIS.

MédiHAL includes 21,007 images, many of them of archaeological sites. Among these are 1946 images of the site of Palmyra, most of them supplied by Ifpo Institut Français Du Proche-Orient.

Open Access Journal: La lettre du Collège de France

La lettre du Collège de France
ISSN: 2109-9219

La lettre du Collège de France, créée en janvier 2001, paraît trois fois par an. Ses articles reflètent la vie de l’institution et les manifestations qui s’y déroulent. On y trouve de nombreuses annonces et informations concernant les chaires et les professeurs du Collège de France, des compte rendus de conférences et de colloques, des interviews de professeurs présentant leur parcours et leurs recherches, des dossiers de fond consacrés à des débats actuels, la présentation des ouvrages publiés par les professeurs ou par le Collège de France.

Numéros en texte intégral

• 39 | mars 2015
  La Lettre n°39
• 38 | juin 2014
  La Lettre n°38
• 37 | Décembre 2013
  La Lettre n°37
• 36 | 2013
  La Lettre n°36
• 32 | octobre 2011
  La Lettre n° 32
• 31 | juin 2011
  La Lettre n° 31
• 30 | décembre 2010
  La Lettre n° 30
• 29 | juillet 2010
  La Lettre n° 29
• 28 | avril 2010
  La Lettre n° 28
• Hors-série 3 | 2010
  Le Tabac
• 27 | décembre 2009
  La Lettre n° 27
• 26 | juin 2009
  La Lettre n° 26
• 25 | mars 2009
  La Lettre n° 25
• 24 | décembre 2008
  La Lettre n° 24
• Hors-série 2 | 2008
  Claude Lévi-Strauss, centième anniversaire

Tous les numéros

Collège de France Newsletter

• 4 | 2009
  The Letter
• 8 | 2014
  Collège de France Newsletter n°8

See also L’Annuaire du Collège de France

  

See the full List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies

Imperium Latin – free of charge to all

Imperium Latin – free of charge to all
By Stephen Jenkin On August 24, 2015

I have just made Books 1, 2 and 3 of my Imperium Latin course available free of charge to all via TES Resources, in the form of downloadable pdf files. I have done this so that:

1. more teachers and students will become aware of Imperium Latin, which is already attracting some very positive reactions in a wide variety of schools.
2. these materials will help schools and individuals whose budgetary pressures are making it difficult to learn and teach Latin, especially those who find it hard to find money to buy books and startup resources.
3. using Imperium will help with recruitment to Latin and to classical studies generally, especially as it moves so quickly and adds so much humour to the process.

The link for downloading the pdf files can be found here:
https://www.tes.com/member/imperiumlatin

Here you will also find translations of four Greek plays, which have also been posted there to be downloaded free of charge.

All of these files are restricted against copying and pasting but in other ways, their use is governed by the Creative Commons NoDerivatives licensing system, which says that if you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.

Some background for those who are new to Imperium…

I started work on Imperium Latin in 2007 and it is now in use in around 30-40 schools, some in the UK, some in the rest of Europe and a few in the USA. It has had a couple of terrific reviews from the American Classical League and JACT. The course follows the life of the Emperor Hadrian, an intellectual of the first rank, an architect without parallel and a traveller who made many fascinating journeys across the empire. The story becomes a potent mix when you throw in his dubious relationship with Trajan, a wife who hated him, the dark business of Antinous and his strange and obsessional behaviour in later life.

Imperium Latin was written to be delivered via screens, using data projectors or smartboards. Early on, I hit on a box-based approach, which has proved very successful in classes. No single exercise in the course ever spills over beyond one page, and no page has more than 10 boxes in any exercise.

The linguistic sequence was designed to rely on the present tense for as long as possible, a technique which has been found successful by many modern language teachers. The hardest clauses and constructions are kept back until later, so the exercises remain accessible. Imperium is rigorous and includes exercises of English into Latin in every chapter, though there is often an overlap between the Latin to English and English to Latin, which makes it possible to lift some of the answers, as well as a full set of MP3 exercises, which can equip either student or teacher to prepare for a class.

When there is something to laugh about, learning often becomes more motivational and it is a central pillar of the course that the material shouldn’t take itself too seriously. Books 1 and 2 are filled with my own jokes, whereas in Book 3, the focus shifts onto Latin witticisms, through a collection of more than 50 poems of Martial.

In addition to the books, the Imperium Word Tools App is a unique system which supports the Latin to English exercises. It draws on the models of open-ended systems such as Perseus and Nodictionaries but is carefully matched to this course and the needs of its students. It runs on Mac, PC, Linux, Android and iOS devices, so it is a complete solution for use at home as well as in the classroom.

All the printed books can be bought via Amazon (simply enter Imperium Latin), and the Apps can be bought from the App Store, Google Play, or the project’s website. It should be noted that for schools wanting to implement the course, the Site Support Pack should be regarded as a basic essential. This includes printable pdf files of all the materials, the Apps for Mac and PC, lots of teaching notes and details, MP3 files, correct answers, tests, unseens, and lots more besides.

In addition to three main coursebooks the Imperium Latin Grammar and Syntax Guide has been designed for use by any student of Latin. There is also a second range of resources called Imperium Latin Unseens, designed for more advanced students. This includes a book, MP3 files and the Imperium Unseen Tools App, as well as a Site Support Pack.

If you want to know more, please visit: www.imperiumlatin.com and/or email: julian@imperiumlatin.com
Julian Morgan

And see AWOL's list of Open Access Textbooks and Language Primers

 

El conflicto armado en Siria y su repercusión sobre el Patrimonio Cultural, Anas Al Khabour

El conflicto armado en Siria y su repercusión sobre el Patrimonio Cultural, Anas Al Khabour

Volumen I. Deir ez-Zor.

El conflicto armado en Siria y su repercusión sobre el Patrimonio Cultural Vol. I: Inventario del Patrimonio Cultural afectado en la provincia de Deir Ez-Zor (marzo 2011-mazro 2015)
Anas Al Khabour
Dirección General de Antigüedades y Museos, 2015
ISBN 978-84-606-7735-2
ISBN978-84-606-9619-3

Volumen II. Raqqa.

El conflicto armado en Siria y su repercusión sobre el Patrimonio Cultural Vol. II: Inventario del Patrimonio Cultural afectado en la provincia de Raqqa (marzo 2011-marzo 2015)
AnasAl Khabour
Dirección General de Antigüedades y Museos, 2015
ISBN 978-84-606-7735-2
ISBN978-84-606-9962-0

Volumen III. Hasakeh.

El conflicto armado en Siria y su repercusión sobre el Patrimonio Cultural Vol. III: Inventario del Patrimonio Cultural afectado en la provincia de Hasakeh (marzo 2011-marzo 2015) 
Anas Al Khabour 
Dirección General de Antigüedades y Museos, 2015
ISBN: 978-84-606-7735-2 
ISBN: 978-84-608-1623-2