Assyrian Stone Vessels and Related Material in the British Museum - Hardcover

Searight, Ann; Reade, Julian; Finkel, Irving

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 184217312X ISBN 13: 9781842173121

Publisher: Oxbow Books, 2008

Synopsis

This catalogue makes available more than 600 complete or fragmentary stone vessels kept in the British Museum. Most of them were excavated at Nineveh and other major sites in northern Iraq and Syria, and are presented here for the first time. They range in date from prehistory down to the Persian and Hellenistic periods; the bulk belong in the eighth and seventh centuries, when the Near East under Assyrian rule grew increasingly cosmopolitan. The collection includes luxury items made for palaces and temples, often bearing royal inscriptions, besides many perfume-jars, mortars and other vessels for practical use. The catalogue incorporates extensive information on material culture, art, technology, economic relationships, and social and religious practices, and will be used by historians, archaeologists, philologists and anthropologists alike.

About this title

About the Author:

Irving Finkel, philologist and Assyriologist, is a spellbinding storyteller and a familiar figure in academic and literary circles. He is the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures in the Department of the Middle East in the British Museum, where he reads cuneiform inscriptions on tablets of clay from ancient Mesopotamia. An expert on the history of board games, he is also the author of many children’s books as well as the best-selling The Ark Before Noah, which recounts his discovery of a cuneiform tablet that contained a Flood narrative far older than the story of Noah and which led to the recreation of the ark for a 2014 TV documentary.

Review:

A. Searight, J. Reade and I. Finkel deserve our deepest gratitude for their excellent work: they have here presented and analysed the material with special attention to the historical context and other general considerations without ever disregarding the importance and interest of the details. We must be very grateful to the authors for drawing us into the 'excavation' of the old material in the stores of the British Museum. These collections, when carefully studied and presented, continue to shed new light on the culture and history of the Ancient Near East, an objective amply fulfilled by this book.' (Davide Nadali Orientalia, Vol. 79, Fasc. 4, 2010)

...provides a welcome treatment of a poorly known corpus of material... The volume as a whole will certainly be an important point of future reference for many specialists.' (Andrew Bevan, University College London AJA Online Book Reviews)

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 184217312X
• ISBN 13: 9781842173121
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192