In Context : The Reade Festschrift

In Context: the Reade Festschrift is a collection of invited and peer-reviewed essays by friends and colleagues of Julian Edgeworth Reade, sometime Mesopotamia curator at the British Museum from 1975 to 2000. Its coverage is designed to reflect the breadth of the recipient’s professional interests, from Assyria and Mesopotamia in general, to the relations between Mesopotamia and other regions and the impact of nineteenth-century discoveries on the field of Assyriology. They include both syntheses and archaeological research, as well as reports on archival discoveries. Context is always crucial. Here is fresh work from which any reader can gain a new appreciation of the importance of the ancient Near East.

Table of Contents

Preface

J.E. Reade: a bibliography of works (1967–2019)

Part 1: Mesopotamia

Massimo VIDALE et al. – Palaeolithic finds from Nineveh

Juris ZARINS – Ur, Lagash and the Gutians: a study of late 3rd millennium BC: Mesopotamian archaeology, texts and politics

Irving L. FINKEL – New light on an old game

Sébastien REY – A Seleucid cult of Sumerian royal ancestors in Girsu

Aage WESTENHOLZ – The sins of Nippur

Ariane THOMAS – A royal chariot for Sargon II

John MACGINNIS – The gods of Arbail

Mogens T. LARSEN – The development of Neo-Assyrian narrative art: toward Assurbanipal’s Ulai river reliefs

Irene WINTER – The harpist’s left hand: a detail from the ‘Banquet Scene’ of Assurbanipal in the North Palace at Nineveh

Simo PARPOLA – The population of Nineveh

St John SIMPSON – Annihilating Assyria

Part 2: Foreign connections

J. Mark KENOYER – Bleached carnelian beads of the Indus Tradition, 3rd millennium BC: origins and variations

Asko PARPOLA – Iconographic evidence of Mesopotamian influence on Harappan ideology and its survival in the royal rites of the Veda and Hinduism

Maurizio CATTANI – The Joint Hadd Project and the Early Bronze Age in south-east Arabia

Stefan KROLL – The location of Mešta in archaeological context

Jonathan N. TUBB – Assyrians in Transjordan

Julie R. ANDERSON – Of Kushite kings and sacred landscapes in the Middle Nile valley

Part 3: Discovery and reception

Dan POTTS – ‘Un coup terrible de la fortune:’ A. Clément and the Qurna disaster of 1855

Stefania ERMIDORO – The William Kennett Loftus legacy to the north: Near Eastern materials in Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Tim CLAYDEN – ‘Two unpublished drawings of excavations at Nimrud’ revisited

John RUSSELL – A bit of a bull and a bit of a puzzle

Henrietta McCALL and Michael SEYMOUR – George Scharf and Assyrian sculpture

Paul COLLINS – Casts and the reception of Assyria

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.