Mortals, Deities and Divine Symbols: Rethinking Ancient Images from the Levant to Mesopotamia

Mortals, Deities and Divine Symbols: Rethinking Ancient Imagery from the Levant to Mesopotamia is dedicated to Tallay Ornan, a scholar who has distinguished herself in ancient Western Asian iconographic studies and has become an undisputed reference in this field. It is divided into three parts, which give greater prominence to Tallay Ornan's major themes: New Discoveries and Approaches in twelve chapters; The Human World (e.g. royals, women) in fourteen chapters; The Divine World (anthropomorphic deities and divine symbols) in eighteen chapters.

The chapters discuss iconological and textual problems from the Levant to Mesopotamia, in a chronological span from the third to first millennia BCE.

Benjamin Sass is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University. Among his books are Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Seals (1997), The Alphabet at the Turn of the Millennium (2005), and Aramaic and Figural Stamp Impressions on Bricks of the Sixth Century B.C. from Babylon (2010). For the last decade he has been writing extensively about the alphabet in the earlier Iron Age, frequently in collaboration with Israel Finkelstein.

Laura Battini is an archaeologist specialised in the Ancient Near East. She is currently a researcher at the French National Centre of Scientific Research (Laboratory PROCLAC, UMR 7192, directed by Thomas Römer). Laura created a new journal for the Ancient Near East (Ash sharq: Bulletin of the Ancient Near East, Archaeopress), and is the editor of the archaeological series Archaeopress Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology.