Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 1 The Near and Middle East

In A Dictionary of Early Middle Turkic Hendrik Boeschoten describes the lexical material contained in works written in different varieties of Eastern Turkic in and around the fourteenth century, e.g. before the classical age of Chaghatay Turkic; late Karakhanid, Khwarezmian Turkic, Golden Horde Turkic, Mamluk Turkic, and early Azeri. As the existing, previously published dictionaries are now antiquated and hardly cover this period (most relevant works were not yet known at their time of writing), A Dictionary of Early Middle Turkic is a most welcome addition to the field.

Akkadian is, after Sumerian, the second oldest language attested in the Ancient Near East, as well as the oldest known Semitic language. It is also a language with one of history’s longest written records. And yet, unlike other relevant languages written over a long period of time, there has been no volume dedicated to its own history. The aim of the present work is to fill that void. The outcome is presented in 26 chapters written by 25 leading authors and divided into two volumes, the first covering the linguistic background and early periods and the second covering the second and first millennia BCE as well as its afterlife.

This book provides an updated view of our knowledge about Phrygian, an Indo-European language attested to have been spoken in Anatolia between the 8th century BC and the Roman Imperial period. Although a linguistic and epigraphic approach is the core of the book, it covers all major topics of research on Phrygian: the historical and archaeological contexts in which the Phrygian texts were found, a comprehensive grammar with diachronic and comparative remarks, an overview of the linguistic contacts attested for Phrygian, a discussion about its position within the Indo-European language family, a complete lexicon and index of the Phrygian inscriptions, a study of the Phrygian glosses and a complete, critical catalogue of the Phrygian inscriptions with new readings and interpretations.

The first dynasty to mint gold dinars outside of the Abbasid heartlands, the Aghlabid (r. 800-909) reign in North Africa has largely been neglected in the scholarship of recent decades, despite the canonical status of its monuments and artworks in early Islamic art history. The Aghlabids and their Neighbors focuses new attention on this key dynasty. The essays in this volume, produced by an international group of specialists in history, art and architectural history, archaeology, and numismatics, illuminate the Aghlabid dynasty’s interactions with neighbors in the western Mediterranean and its rivals and allies elsewhere, providing a state of the question on early medieval North Africa and revealing the centrality of the dynasty and the region to global economic and political networks.

Contributors: Lotfi Abdeljaouad, Glaire D. Anderson, Lucia Arcifa, Fabiola Ardizzone, Alessandra Bagnera, Jonathan M. Bloom, Lorenzo Bondioli, Chloé Capel, Patrice Cressier, Mounira Chapoutot-Remadi, Abdelaziz Daoulatli, Claire Déléry, Ahmed El Bahi, Kaoutar Elbaljan, Ahmed Ettahiri, Abdelhamid Fenina, Elizabeth Fentress, Abdallah Fili, Mohamed Ghodhbane, Caroline Goodson, Soundes Gragueb Chatti, Khadija Hamdi, Renata Holod, Jeremy Johns, Tarek Kahlaoui, Hugh Kennedy, Sihem Lamine, Faouzi Mahfoudh, David Mattingly, Irene Montilla, Annliese Nef, Elena Pezzini, Nadège Picotin, Cheryl Porter, Dwight Reynolds, Viva Sacco, Elena Salinas, Martin Sterry.

In Creating the Mediterranean: Maps and the Islamic Imagination Tarek Kahlaoui treats the subject of the Islamic visual representations of the Mediterranean. It tracks the history of the Islamic visualization of the sea from when geography was created by the Islamic state’s bureaucrats of the tenth century C.E. located mainly in the central Islamic lands, to the later men of the field, specifically the sea captains from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries C.E. located in the western Islamic lands.

A narrative has emerged from this investigation in which the metamorphosis of the identity of the author or mapmaker seemed to be changing with the rest of the elements that constitute the identity of a map: its reader or viewer, its style and structure, and its textual content.

In Aesthetics in Arabic Thought from Pre-Islamic Arabia through al-Andalus José Miguel Puerta Vílchez analyzes the discourses about beauty, the arts, and sense perception that arose within classical Arab culture from pre-Islamic poetry and the Quran (sixth-seventh centuries CE) to the Alhambra palace in Granada (fourteenth century CE). He focuses on the contributions of such great thinkers as Ibn Ḥazm, Avempace, Ibn Ṭufayl, Averroes, Ibn ʿArabī, and Ibn Khaldūn in al-Andalus, and the Brethren of Purity, al-Tawḥīdī, al-Fārābī, Avicenna, Alhazen, and al-Ghazālī in the East.
The work also explores literary criticism, calligraphy, music, belles-lettres (adab), and erotic literature, and highlights the contribution of Arab humanism to shaping the field of Aesthetics in the West.

This atlas offers a survey of the history of Southeast Europe from 1699 until 1815, from the Treaty of Karlowitz until the eve of the Second Serbian Uprising. It covers modern-day Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Romania (Wallachia and Transylvania), Dalmatia, Greece and Cyprus.

The Arabic-Ethiopic Glossary by al-Malik al-Afḍal by Maria Bulakh and Leonid Kogan is a detailed annotated edition of a unique monument of Late Medieval Arabic lexicography, comprising 475 Arabic lexemes (some of them post-classical Yemeni dialectisms) translated into several Ethiopian idioms and put down in Arabic letters in a late-fourteenth century manuscript from a codex in a private Yemeni collection. For the many languages involved, the Glossary provides the earliest written records, by several centuries pre-dating the most ancient attestations known so far. The edition, preceded by a comprehensive linguistic introduction, gives a full account of the comparative material from all known Ethiopian Semitic languages. A detailed index ensures the reader’s orientation in the lexical treasures revealed from the Glossary.

Since the author's publication of Die nordjemenitischen Dialekte. Teil 1: Atlas in 1985, a lot of new field work has been done in North Yemen and adjacent areas with new data especially from the extreme north of Yemen and neighbouring areas in Saudi Arabia. These are considered to be the most archaic Arabic dialect areas. The publication of a new atlas of the region in English therefore suggested itself. The atlas consists of 192 fully coloured maps with 30 phonetical and phonological maps, 100 morphological and 60 lexical ones. Depending on the subject the maps are accompanied by shorter or longer commentaries and paradigms. The book is of interest to Arabists, Semitists and dialectologists.

This atlas offers a survey of the history of Southeast Europe from 1521 until 1699, from the first major land campaign undertaken by Sultan Süleyman I until the Treaty of Karlowitz at the end of the seventeenth century. It covers modern-day Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Romania (Walachia and Transylvania), Dalmatia, Greece and Cyprus.

As with any dictionary of a newly discovered dead language, the aim of this Dictionary of the Ugaritic alphabetic texts is to indicate the stage reached in its lexical description and to serve as a reference work for further study. In this connection, the main interpretative opinions have been included, since to a large extent Ugaritic lexicography remains uncertain. Also the most relevant comparative Semitic material has been provided in order to corroborate the lexical choices adopted by the authors and help readers to verify their own. The new material discovered since 1992 and recently published has also been included, along with all the personal and topographical names as in the two previous editions.

Aramaic is a constant thread running through the various civilizations of the Near East, ancient and modern, from 1000 BCE to the present, and has been the language of small principalities, world empires, and a fair share of the Jewish-Christian tradition. Holger Gzella describes its cultural and linguistic history as a continuous evolution from its beginnings to the advent of Islam. For the first time the individual phases of the language, their socio-historical underpinnings, and the textual sources are discussed comprehensively in light of the latest linguistic and historical research and with ample attention to scribal traditions, multilingualism, and language as a marker of cultural self-awareness. Many new observations on Aramaic are thereby integrated into a coherent historical framework.

The El-Amarna Correspondence offers a completely new edition of the Amarna Letters based on personal inspection and reading of all the extant tablets. This edition includes new transcriptions and a translation along with an extensive introduction and glossary of the Amarna Letters.

A comprehensive and methodologically sophisticated history of Arabic lexicography, this book fills a serious gap in modern scholarship. Besides meticulously examining the factors that led to the emergence of lexicographical writing as of the second/eighth century, the work comprises detailed discussions of the aims, range, and approaches of the most important writings and writers of lexica specialized in specific topics and multi thematic thesauri, and the lexica arranged according to roots. The organisation of the book and the lists of works cited in the various genres make it easy for the reader to find his way through an enormous amount of material. From a broader perspective, the book highlights the relationship between Arabic lexicography and other areas of linguistic study, grammar in particular, and the centrality of Qurʾan and poetry to lexicographical writing.

The historical and cultural role of the Aramaeans in ancient Syria can hardly be overestimated. Thus The Aramaeans in Ancient Syria gives precise and up-to-date information on different aspects of Aramaean culture. To that end, history, society, economy and law, language and script, literature, religion, art and architecture of the Aramaean kingdoms of Syria from their beginnings in the 11 century B.C. until their end at approximately 720 B.C. are covered within the handbook. The wide survey of Aramaean culture in Syria is supplemented by overviews on the Aramaeans in Assyria, Babylonia, Phoenicia, Palestine, Egypt, North Arabia and on the Aramaean heritage in the Levant.

Ancient Synagogues - Archaeology and Art. New Discoveries and Current Research presents archaeological evidence - the architecture, art, Jewish symbols, zodiac, biblical tales, inscriptions, and coins – which attest to the importance of the synagogue. When considered as a whole, all these pieces of evidence confirm the centrality of the synagogue institution in the life of the Jewish communities all through Israel and in the Diaspora. Most importantly, the synagogue and its art and architecture played a powerful role in the preservation of the fundamental beliefs, customs, and traditions of the Jewish people following the destruction of the Second Temple and the loss of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. The book also includes a supplement of the report on the Qazion excavation.

Ancient Egyptian Administration provides the first comprehensive overview of the structure, organization and evolution of the pharaonic administration from its origins to the end of the Late Period. The book not only focuses on bureaucracy, departments, and official practices but also on more informal issues like patronage, the limits in the actual exercise of authority, and the competing interests between institutions and factions within the ruling elite. Furthermore, general chapters devoted to the best-documented periods in Egyptian history are supplemented by more detailed ones dealing with specific archives, regions, and administrative problems. The volume thus produced by an international team of leading scholars will be an indispensable, up-to-date, tool of research covering a much-neglected aspect of pharaonic civilization.

This volume represents the state of the art in research on the controversial Muslim legal scholar, theologian and man of letters Ibn Ḥazm of Cordoba (d. 456/1064), who is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant minds of Islamic Spain. Remembered mostly for his charming treatise on love, he was first and foremost a fierce polemicist who was much criticized for his idiosyncratic views and his abrasive language. Insisting that the sacred sources of Islam are to be understood in their outward sense and that it is only the Prophet Muḥammad whose example may be followed, Ibn Ḥazm alienated himself from his peers. As a result, his books were burned and he was forced to withdraw from public life.

Contributors are: Camilla Adang, Hassan Ansari, Samuel-Martin Behloul, Alfonso Carmona, Leigh Chipman, Maribel Fierro, Alejandro García Sanjuán, Livnat Holtzman, Samir Kaddouri, Joep Lameer, Christian Lange, Gabriel Martinez Gros, Luis Molina, Salvador Peña, Jose Miguel Puerta Vilchez, Rafael Ramón Guerrero, Adam Sabra, Sabine Schmidtke, Delfina Serrano, Bruna Soravia, Dominique Urvoy, Kees Versteegh and David Wasserstein.

Andalusi Arabic is a close-knit bundle of Neo-Arabic dialects resulting from interference by Ibero-Romance stock and interaction of some Arabic dialects. These dialects are mostly Northern but there are also some Southern and hybrid ones, brought along to the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century A.D. by an invading army of some thousands of Arab tribesmen who, in the company of a much larger number of partially Arabicized Berbers, all of them fighting men alone, succeeded in establishing Islamic political rule and Arab cultural supremacy for a long while over these lands. The study of Andalusi Arabic is of enormous interest to the Arabic dialectologist, as well as a subject of paramount importance to those concerned with the medieval literatures and cultures of Western Europe.

After publishing A Grammar of the Bedouin Dialects of the Northern Sinai Littoral: Bridging the Linguistic Gap between the Eastern and Western Arab World (Brill:2000), Rudolf de Jong completes his description of the Bedouin dialects of the Sinai Desert of Egypt by adding the present volume. To facilitate direct comparison of all Sinai dialects, the dialect descriptions in both volumes run parallel and are thus structured in the same manner. Quoting from his own extensive material and using a total of 95 criteria for comparison, De Jong applies the method of 'multi-dimensional scaling' and his own 'step-method' to arrive at a subdivision into eight (of which seven are 'Bedouin') typological groups in Sinai. An appendix with 68 maps and dialectrometrical plots completes the picture.

Iran, or Persia as it was known in the West for most of its long history, has been mapped extensively for centuries but the absence of a good cartobibliography has often deterred scholars of its history and geography from making use of the many detailed maps that were produced. This is now available, prepared by Cyrus Alai who embarked on a lengthy investigation into the old maps of Persia, and visited major map collections and libraries in many countries.
With over four hundred separate map entries and over two hundred illustrations this work covers all the important printed general maps of Persia from the early editions of Ptolemy at the end of the 15th century until 1925 when the Qajar dynasty was overthrown. Useful historical accounts provide the background to this wealth of cartographic achievement. After a description of the many editions of Ptolemy, later maps are divided into groups according to the country where they were produced: Italy, the Low Countries, France, Germany, Great Britain, Russia, America, Persia, Turkey, and Spain with Portugal. This permits the work of a single cartographer to be handled in an uninterrupted sequence, thus aiding quick reference to a particular style of map, and its later offshoots.
At the end of each major entry, further details concerning different editions and variations, other related maps, historical notes and unique or important features are provided, thus fitting the map into its chronological background. The large number of indexes at the end of the book should enable map collectors, dealers and librarians to identify any map of Persia with ease.
This book is a good balance between history and geography, and will appeal to a wide range of readers. Many Persian maps have surely been rescued from obscurity, and it is now possible to study sequence of developing geographical knowledge over a historically and economically important part of Asia. It is unlikely to be superseded for a very long time.
This second, revised edition includes two new maps and a list of addenda.

Arab painting, preserved mainly in manuscript illustrations of the 12th to 14th centuries, is here treated as an artistic corpus fully deserving of appreciation in its own terms, and not as a mere precursor to Persian painting. The book assembles papers by a distinguished list of scholars that illuminate the variety of material that survives in scientific as well as literary manuscripts. Because of the contexts in which the paintings appear, a major theoretical concern is, precisely, the relationship of painting to text. It rejects earlier scholarly habits of analysing paintings in isolation, and proposes the integration of text and image as a more satisfactory framework within which to elucidate the characteristics and functions of this impressive body of work.

Arranged alphabetically by subject and/or concept, the present handbook has been conceived, for convenience sake and quick reference, as an aid to students and researchers who are often puzzled or even sometimes intimidated by the ‘mysterious’ world of Arabic manuscripts and the technical language that goes with it. A companion volume to the recently published The Arabic Manuscript Tradition (2001) and its Supplement (2008), the vademecum comprises some 200 entries of varying lengths dealing with almost all aspects of Arabic manuscript studies (codicology and palaeography). It is richly illustrated with specimens from manuscripts and expertly executed drawings. The main sequence is followed by a number of appendices covering abbreviations, letterforms, sūrah-headings, major reference works and a guide to the description of manuscripts, as well as charts of major historical periods and dynasties.

One of the main cultural consequences of the contacts between Islam and the West has been the borrowing of hundreds of words, mostly of Arabic but also of other important languages of the Islamic world, such as Persian, Turkish, Berber, etc. by Western languages. Such loanwords are particularly abundant and relevant in the case of the Iberian Peninsula because of the presence of Islamic states in it for many centuries; their study is very revealing when it comes to assess the impact of those states in the emergence and shaping of Western civilization. Some famous Arabic scholars, above all R. Dozy, have tackled this task in the past, followed by other attempts at increasing and improving his pioneering work; however, the progresses achieved during the last quarter of the 20th c., in such fields as Andalusi and Andalusi Romance dialectology and lexicology made it necessary to update all the available information on this topic and to offer it in English.

The Aramaic language has continued to be spoken in various dialects down to modern times. Many of these dialects, however, are now endangered due to political events in the Middle East over the last hundred years. This work, in three volumes, presents a description of one such endangered neo-Aramaic dialect, that of the Assyrian Christian community of the Barwar region in northern Iraq. It is a unique record of the dialect based on interviews with the surviving older generation of the community. Volume one contains a detailed grammatical description of the dialect, including sections on phonology, morphology and syntax. Volume two contains an extensive glossary of the lexicon of the dialect with illustrations of various aspects of the material culture. Volume three contains transcriptions of numerous recorded texts, including folktales, ethnographic texts, songs, and proverbs.

The purpose of this book is to draw attention to the sites of life, politics and culture where current and past generations of the Islamic world have made their mark. Unlike many previous volumes dealing with the city in the Islamic world, this one has been expanded not only to include snapshots of historical fabric, but also to deal with the transformation of this fabric into modern and contemporary urban entities. Salma Khadra Jayyusi was awarded Cultural Personality of the Year by the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for her profound contribution to Arabic literature and culture in 2020. The paperback edition of The City in the Islamic World was published to celebrate the occasion.

The present work supplements the original volume of The Arabic Manuscript Tradition (AMT), both its glossary of technical terms and bibliography. It includes new entries of technical terms, additional definitions of, and/or citations for, the entries already found in AMT, and recent publications on various aspects of Arabic manuscript studies arranged by subject. Among additional features there are illustrations of various Arabic letterforms and an alphabetical index of all works cited in both AMT and its supplement.

The Qurʾan is the living source of all Islamic teaching, and is of singular importance to those interested in Islam and the study of religions. Despite this, there exists a long-felt lack of research tools for English first-language speakers who wish to access the Qurʾan in the original Arabic.
The Dictionary of Qurʾanic Usage is the first comprehensive, fully-researched and contextualised Arabic-English dictionary of Qurʾanic usage, compiled in accordance with modern lexicographical methods by scholars who have a lifelong immersion in Qurʾanic Studies. Based on Classical Arabic dictionaries and Qurʾan commentaries, this work also emphasises the role of context in determining the meaning-scatter of each vocabulary item. Illustrative examples from Qurʾanic verses are provided in support of the definitions given for each context in which a particular word occurs, with cross-references to other usages. Frequently occurring grammatical particles are likewise thoroughly explained, insofar as they are used in conveying various nuances of meaning in the text.

This is the third and final volume of the Etymological Dictionary of Egyptian. It comprises the Egyptian words with initial m-. The amount of material offered, the extensive treatment of scholarly discussions on each item, and the insights into the connections of Egyptian and the related Afro-Asiatic (Semito-Hamitic) languages, including many new lexical parallels, will make it an indispensable tool for comparative purposes and an unchallenged starting point for every linguist in the field.
The reader will find the etymological entries even more detailed than those of the introductory volume, due to the full retrospective presentation of all etymologies proposed since A. Erman's time, and thanks to an extremely detailed discussion of all possible relevant data even on the less known Afro-Asiatic cognates to the Egyptian roots.

This book charts the development of Islamic ships and boats in the Western Indian Ocean from the seventh to the early sixteenth century with reference to earlier periods. It utilizes mainly Classical and Medieval Arabic sources with iconographical evidence and archaeological finds. Maritime activities in the region resulted in a cross fertilization, not only of goods but also of ideas and culture which gave an underlying cohesion to the Arabian, Persian and Indian maritime peoples. This study has led to a re-evaluation of that maritime culture, showing that it was predominantly Persian and Indian, with Chinese influence, throughout the Islamic period until the coming of the Portuguese, as reflected in nautical terminology and technology.

This volume comprises an analysis of 112 divine epithets occurring in the alphabetic cuneiform texts from Ras Shamra and Ras Ibn Hani. It is intended to encompass all the epithets of the individual Ugaritic deities, semi-divine, and demonic beings, both good and evil, attested in the published texts. The epithets are profound expressions of the religious views of the ancient Ugaritians and their comprehension is essential for understanding the role, character, and status of the various deities in the Ugaritic pantheon. Particular attention has been paid to parallel divine epithets in Akkadian, biblical Hebrew, and classical Arabic.

Arab painting, preserved mainly in manuscript illustrations of the 12th to 14th centuries, is here treated as an artistic corpus fully deserving of appreciation in its own terms, and not as a mere precursor to Persian painting. The book assembles papers by a distinguished list of scholars that illuminate the variety of material that survives in scientific as well as literary manuscripts. Because of the contexts in which the paintings appear, a major theoretical concern is, precisely, the relationship of painting to text. It rejects earlier scholarly habits of analysing paintings in isolation, and proposes the integration of text and image as a more satisfactory framework within which to elucidate the characteristics and functions of this impressive body of work.

This handbook provides a complete and updated view of our current knowledge about Carian, one of the Indo-European languages spoken in ancient Anatolia. The decipherment of the Carian alphabet has only recently made it possible to analyze Carian inscriptions and to classify the Carian language linguistically.
The book covers all major topics of research on Carian: the direct and indirect sources with an edition of the Carian inscriptions following a new classification system, the history of the decipherment, the Carian alphabet, and the phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic features of the language. It includes an annotated Carian glossary.
The volume concludes with a special appendix on Carian coins and legends by Koray Konuk that will be of particular interest to specialists in ancient numismatics.

This volume deals with the chronology of Ancient Egypt from the fourth millennium until the Hellenistic Period. An initial section reviews the foundations of Egyptian chronology, both ancient and modern, from annals and kinglists to C14 analyses of archaeological data. Specialists discuss sources, compile lists of known dates, and analyze biographical information in the section devoted to relative chronology. The editors are responsible for the final section which attempts a synthesis of the entire range of available data to arrive at alternative absolute chronologies. The prospective readership includes specialists in Near Eastern and Aegean studies as well as Egyptologists.

Historical Muscat is an attempt to define and explain the historical environment that determined the significance and design of Oman’s capital city Muscat, its twin city Matrah, and their environs prior to 1970. It also examines how the development of the Muscat conurbation since 1970 has transcended the historical boundaries of the existing settlements and how the process of development has proceeded largely without any consideration of the impact on Muscat’s tangible or remembered history.
At the heart of the book is a historical gazetteer of forts, gates, palaces, mosques, houses, quarters, settlements, and other sites covering the broader Muscat region from Bandar Jissah to al-Sib. The text is accompanied by a large number of illustrations, including maps from various eras and both historical and more contemporary photographs.

This is the first comprehensive examination of block printing in the medieval Islamic world. Examples of Arabic block prints have been preserved in various collections across the globe, but they have long been treated as curiosities and oddities. Here, for the first time, a large representative corpus of block prints is examined and illustrated. The first section of the book places Arabic block printing in historical perspective and recounts their rediscovery by modern day scholars. The second section illustrates fifty-five examples of medieval Arabic block printed amulets, provides detailed techical descriptions of each, presents transcriptions of their texts into legible Arabic and offers translations of those texts into English.

This second volume of a two-part project on the Mishnah displays a broad selection of approaches to the study of the Mishnah in the contemporary academy. The work derives from Israel, North America, and Europe and shows the intellectual vitality of scholarship in all three centers of learning. What these articles show in diverse ways is that the Mishnah forms a critical focus of the study of Judaism. The authors of these studies represent the best of contemporary scholarship on the Mishnah. Because of the many viewpoints included here, this is the most representative selection of contemporary Mishnah-study available in any collection in a Western language.

This project presents in three volumes the Mishnah’s and the Tosefta’s first division, Zera‘im (Agriculture), organized in eleven topical tractates, together with a systematic history of the law of Zeraim in the Mishnah. To the exposition of the Halakhah on the chosen topic, the Mishnah-tractates are primary but complemented by the Tosefta’s presentation of its collection of glosses of the Mishnah’s law and supplements to that law.
The Mishnah’s and the Tosefta’s tractates are integrated, with the Tosefta’s complement given in the setting of the Mishnah’s rules, and the whole is given in English translation. The presentation in each case encompasses an introduction, a form-analytical translation and commentary, a systematic integration of the Tosefta’s compositions into the Mishnah’s laws, an explanation of the details of the law, and an inquiry into how the Halakhah of the Mishnah and that of the Tosefta intersect, item by item.

This volume is the first comprehensive and systematic description of the dialect geography of the Arabic language which investigates the methods and insights developed in the European context and how these can be applied to the domain of Arabic. It also deals briefly with the problems of the historical development of the modern Arabic dialects. With the help of 112 maps it examines topics such as types of maps, interpretation of maps, areal norms and their significance for Arabic and defining dialect borders. For the first time dialectometrical procedures are applied to Arabic dialects. It can be used as a practical introduction into Arabic dialect geography because in addition it discusses extensively methods of designing dialect geography maps a investigational techniques in the field.

The present volume is the long-awaited concordance of the Egyptian coffin texts. It forms the sequel to A Hieroglyphic Dictionary of Egyptian Coffin Texts by the same author. In 1961 A. de Buck published his important seven-volume corpus Egyptian Coffin Texts. The importance of these texts is considerable for a variety of reasons; they are one of the most important literary texts of classical Egypt; the many variants greatly enlarge our understanding of grammar and linguistic structures; the coffin texts are magical texts, the effectiveness of which depended upon the exact reproductions of the original spells.
In this concordance the various readings of each lemma are provided in transliteration into the Latin alphabet, which makes the concordance easily accessible for those unable to read hieroglyphs. The material is divided into the morphological categories of the verb; within each category the verbs are treated in alphabetical order.

The North-West Semitic epigraphic contributes considerably to our understanding of the Old Testament and of the Ugaritic texts and to our knowledge of the North-West Semitic languages as such. This dictionary is concerned with the North-West Semitic material found in inscriptions, papyri and ostraca in Phoenician, Punic, Hebrew, various forms of Aramaic, Ammonite, Edomite, the language of Deir Alla et cetera. The material covers the period from ca. 1000 B.C. to ca. 300 A.D. Besides translations, the entries include discussions and full references to scholarly literature. The book is a translated, updated and considerably augmented edition of Jean & Hoftijzer, Dictionnaire des inscriptions sémitiques de l'ouest. The additions concern newly found texts as well as references to new scholarly literature. The book is an indispensable tool for research in North-West Semitic epigraphy, on the Old Testament and on Ugaritic texts, and for Semitic linguistics.

Please note that this version is an unrevised reprint of the original version published in 1995.

The particular aim of this volume is an extensive compilation of Hattian words based on Hittite written sources. It sets itself the task of listing all Hattian lexical elements alphabetically as they occur as words or in word combinations, with text references, and relevant bibliography. The main part of the book, the "List of Hattian Words," contains morphological analyses of the Hattian lexemes, their Hittite equivalents in the bilingual documents as well as the lexical elements Hittite borrowed from Hattian. Apart from the word list this study offers information on the Hattian text corpus, Hattian phonetics, grammar and semantics.

Karaism is a Jewish religious movement of a scripturalist and messianic nature, which emerged in the Middle Ages in the areas of Persia-Iraq and Palestine and has maintained its unique and varied forms of identity and existence until the present day, undergoing resurgent cycles of creativity, within its major geographical centres of the Middle-East, Byzantium-Turkey, the Crimea and Eastern Europe.
This Guide to Karaite Studies contains thirty-seven chapters which cover all the main areas of medieval and modern Karaite history and literature, including geographical and chronological subdivisions, and special sections devoted to the history of research, manuscripts and printing, as well as detailed bibliographies, index and illustrations. The substantial volume reflects the current state of scholarship in this rapidly growing sub-field of Jewish Studies, as analysed by an international team of experts and taught in various universities throughout Europe, Israel and the United States.

This is the first up-to-date, and complete grammar of Egyptian Aramaic as presented in texts of Egyptian provenance dating from the middle of the first millennium B.C.E. and as edited by B. Porten and A. Yardeni in their Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt (Jerusalem, 1986-). The grammar covers not only the phonology and morphology, but contains a substantial section on morphosyntax and syntax. It is a descriptive grammar enriched with the expert knowledge and familiarity of one of the co-authors with the contents and background of the texts in question. It is meant to replace P. Leander's Laut- und Formenlehre des Ägyptisch-Aramäischen (1928), but also supplements it substantially, because it had no syntax.
Due to the utmost importance and interest of these ancient texts, this grammar is a vade mecum for every Aramaist, Semitist and Historian in the field.

Long recognized as a brilliant cross-cultural study, Yochanan Muffs’ work analyzes the legal formulary of the Aramaic papyri from Elephantine, at the first cataract of the Nile, where a Persian garrison comprised of Jewish soldiers and their families lived throughout most of the 5th century B.C.E. These documents are of exceptional importance for the study of ancient Near Eastern law, and Muffs has investigated their formative background through extensive references to cuneiform law, by a method he calls “the Assyriological approach”. Virtually every aspect of law-sale of land, marriage and family law, loans and credit, the taking of oaths, and the granting of bequests is studied in great depth and with unusual clarity. Muffs’ work has enjoyed renewed interest in the light of more recent discoveries of Aramaic legal documents from later periods, as in the Judean Desert.

The first comprehensive survey of the world's oldest known legal systems, this collaborative work of twenty-two scholars covers over 3,000 years of legal history of the Ancient Near East. Each of the book's chapters represents a review of the law of a particular period and region, e.g. the Egyptian Old Kingdom, by a specialist in that area. Within each chapter, the material is organized under standardized legal categories (e.g. constitutional law, family law) that make for easy cross-referencing. The chapters are arranged chronologically by millennium and within each millennium by the three major politico-cultural spheres of the region: Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia and the Levant. An introduction by the editor discusses the general character of Ancient Near Eastern Law.

It seems safe to say that this Sumerian Grammar by Professor D.O. Edzard will become the new classic reference in the field. It is an up-to-date, reliable guide to the language of the Sumerians, the inventors of cuneiform writing in the late 4th millennium B.C., and thus essential contributors to the high cultural standard of the whole of Mesopotamia and beyond.
Following traditional lines, the Grammar describes general characteristics, origins, linguistic environment, phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, and phraseology.
Due attention is given to the symbiosis with Semitic Akkadian, with which Sumerian was to form a veritable linguistic area.
With lucid explanations of all technical linguistic theory. Each transliteration carries its English translation.

The Luwians played at least as important a role as the Hittites in the history of the Ancient Near East during the second and first millennia BCE, but for various reasons they have been overshadowed by and even confused with their more famous relatives and neighbours. Redressing this imbalance, the present volume by an international team of scholars offers a comprehensive, state-of-the-art appraisal of the Luwians, the first of its kind in English. A brief introduction sets the context and confronts the problem of defining 'the Luwians'. Following chapters describe their prehistory, history, writing and language, religion, and material culture.

This is the first comprehensive survey of Christian architecture in Egypt from the fourth century up to early modern times, covering not only church architecture, but also and extensively the building art of pilgrimage centers, monasteries, cemeteries, defence structures and private houses. Special attention is given to building technique, arrangement of the interior, and liturgical (local) conditions. With a descriptive catalogue of urban and monastic churches.

This work does not aim to be an etymological dictionary of Qur'ānic Arabic, nor does it attempt to suggest some new genetic classification of the Semitic languages. Rather, it offers insights into the internal lexical relationships attested in a number of Semitic varieties.
The work is based on a quantitative analysis of a substantial corpus of the Arabic lexicon with a view to investigating lexical relationships within a number of Semitic languages. Qur'ānic Arabic is the source of a lexical mass comparison exercise involving Akkadian, Ugaritic, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew, Phoenician, Epigraphic South Arabian and Ge‘ez.
Moreover, the lexical links identified in this study are in themselves linguistic indicators of the various degrees of cultural proximity characterising the various Semitic languages.

The authors of the studies on the Mishnah collected in the present volumes represent the best of contemporary scholarship on that document. In the past thirty years, the Mishnah seen as a document on its own terms has taken its place as a principal focus in the academic study of religion and of Judaism. Many university scholars have participated in the contemporary revolution in the description, analysis, and interpretation of the Mishnah. Nearly all the publishing scholars of the academy (as distinct from the yeshiva or rabbinical seminary) who are now at work are represented in this project, ultimately planned for three volumes. In this and the companion volumes, the editors place on display a broad selection of approaches to the study of the Mishnah in the contemporary academy. What they prove in diverse ways is that the Mishnah defines the critical focus of the study of Judaism. It is a document that rewards study in the academic humanities.
Because many viewpoints register here, this is the most representative selection of contemporary Mishnah-study available in any state-of-the-question-collection in a Western language.

This book is about all aspects of man’s contact with the animal world; sacrifice, sacred animals, diet, domestication, in short, from the sublime to the mundane.
Chapters on art, literature, religion and animal husbandry provide the reader with a complete picture of the complex relationships between the peoples of the Ancient Near East and (their) animals.
A reference guide and key to the menagerie of the Ancient Near East, with ample original illustrations.

This study surveys a distinctive type of the “Islamic” book which has been largely neglected in previous scholarship: the genre of illustrated lithographed books produced in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Iran.
In addition to introducing the history of printing in Iran and surveying the investigated sources, the study supplies basic data on genres of illustrated books, artists active in lithographic illustration, and aspects germane to this particular field of art. The documentation includes bibliographical references for 116 illustrated books in a total of 351 particular editions and 150 plates with several hundred single illustrations.
Lithographic illustration in Iran constitutes the legitimate successor to manuscript illustration, both in content and style. Contrasting with the latter’s refinement, lithographed illustrations were produced in large numbers and served as a powerful medium of popular iconography.

The authors have asked of the documents of the Dead Sea Library found at Qumran a simple question: how does each participate in a single Judaic religious system? They propose a reading of the Scrolls from the hypothesis that all of them, in one way or another, rest upon one, authoritative, Judaism. Their analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls describes how diverse writings hold together to make a single coherent statement, to stand for a religious system possessed of integrity and wisdom.
This account of the world view of Judaism covers principal questions addressed to any Judaic religious system: the doctrine of God, the Torah, and matters of history, wisdom, and mysticism. When it comes to the way of life, they include the evidence of the material culture of the community as well as practical matters of religious conduct.
How the community’s world view comes to realization is suggested by its treatment of the calendar, by its provision of laws that concern women, by questions of cultic and secular purity, by its piety and forms of worship and views of Temple, sacrifice, and the like.
Finally, with the community’s definition of ‘Israel’ and of itself in relationship to ‘Israel’, inclusive of Israelites excluded from this ‘Israel’, an account is gained of the theory of who and what is Israel that animates the particular Judaism represented in these writings.

Carefully selected examples from texts and dialects of the whole Phoenician-Punic period bring to life the grammatical description of this language. Included are fully vocalized Punic and Neo-Punic inscriptions of Roman Tripolitiana in Latin orthography as well as the literary fragments of Punic drama as found in Plautus' comedy Poenulus.
This classical descriptive grammar of the Phoenician-Punic language (1200 BCE - 350 CE) presents the reader with a full picture: its phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax and usage. Its history and its various dialects are dealt with in an introduction.
Hebraists and Semitists will find the description of the verbal system of particular interest to them, especially that of the literary language, which holds that tense and aspect reference of a given form of the verb is largely a function of syntax, not morphology. Much of this grammatical material is presented here for the first time.

What, in Judaism - a religion so concerned with social norms and public policy - can we possibly mean by "law"? That is the thoroughly fresh perspective with which this work commences. It proceeds with two chapters on Second Temple Judaism, and two on the special subject of the Dead Sea library.
Learning withers when criticism is substituted by political consensus, and when other than broadly accepted viewpoints find a hearing only with difficulty, if at all. The editors, therefore, invited colleagues from the USA, Europe, and Israel to systematically outline their views in one account and set it alongside contrary ones. The several participants explain how, in broad and sweeping terms, they see the state of learning in their areas of special interest.
The volume provides first an overview, followed by a systematic, critical account of the fading consensus. In a number of accounts, the different perspectives are presented in scholarly debate. Because of the willingness of contending parties to meet one another in a single frame of discourse, the work is able to portray with considerable breadth the presently contending viewpoints concerning the use of Rabbinical literature for historical purposes. Besides this sustained and vigorous debate, precipitated by historical-critical reading of the rabbinical literature, other issues have attracted attention, such as, for example, feminist interests.

Covering the entire spectrum of Arabic manuscripts, and especially the handwritten book, this book consists of a glossary of technical terms and a bibliography. The technical terms, collected from a variety of sources, embrace a vast range of topics dealing with the making and reading (studying) of Arabic manuscripts. They include: the Arabic scripts, penmanship, writing materials and implements, the make-up of the codex, copying and correction, decoration and bookbinding. A similar coverage is reflected in the bibliography.
In view of the fact that, as yet, there is no concise monograph on Arabic manuscripts in the English language, this book is an important contribution to this field. And, since Arabic manuscripts represent an enormous resource for research, this work is an indispensable reference for all students of Islamic civilization.

The Onomasticon of the Hittite Pantheon by Ben van Gessel was published in 1998. In three years time the work has established itself as the ultimate comprehensive reference work concerning the Hittite pantheon.
With the publication of Part Three, the main work will be made accessible to a wider circle of all those interested in the ancient Near East. Moreover, it will prove to be an indispensable key to the abundance of information until now only to be found scattered throughout the Onomasticon.
The easy-reference glossaries contain all the (word )forms quoted from Hittite texts in the Onomasticon. A special feature of these glossaries is that they not only give the (English) meaning of the (word) forms, but that they also indicate, where appropriate, in relation to which deities they may appear. Also of importance are the lists of personal and geographical names and festivals included.
Part Three further includes additions resulting from new discoveries and corrections of earlier references in the Onomasticon.

The authors have asked of the documents of the Dead Sea Library found at Qumran a simple question: how does each participate in a single Judaic religious system? They propose a reading of the Scrolls from the hypothesis that all of them, in one way or another, rest upon one, authoritative, Judaism. Their analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls describes how diverse writings hold together to make a single coherent statement, to stand for a religious system possessed of integrity and wisdom.
This account of the world view of Judaism covers principal questions addressed to any Judaic religious system: the doctrine of God, the Torah, and matters of history, wisdom, and mysticism. When it comes to the way of life, they include the evidence of the material culture of the community as well as practical matters of religious conduct.
How the community’s world view comes to realization is suggested by its treatment of the calendar, by its provision of laws that concern women, by questions of cultic and secular purity, by its piety and forms of worship and views of Temple, sacrifice, and the like.
Finally, with the community’s definition of ‘Israel’ and of itself in relationship to ‘Israel’, inclusive of Israelites excluded from this ‘Israel’, an account is gained of the theory of who and what is Israel that animates the particular Judaism represented in these writings.

Ugaritic, discovered in 1929, is a North-West Semitic language, documented on clay tablets (about 1250 texts) and dated from the period between the 14th and the 12th centuries B.C.E. The documents are of various types: literary, administrative, lexicological. Numerous Ugaritic tablets contain portions of a poetic cycle pertaining to the Ugaritic pantheon. Another part, the administrative documents shed light on the organization of Ugarit, thus contributing greatly to our understanding of the history and culture of the biblical and North-West Semitic world.
This important reference work, a revised and translated edition of the author's Hebrew publication (Beer Sheva, 1993), deals with the phonology, morphology and syntax of Ugaritic. The book contains also an appendix with text selections.

Given the many excellent editions of Samaritan writings (e.g. The Pentateuch) in recent years, the need was felt for a comprehensive dictionary of Samaritan Aramaic. Abraham Tal’s Dictionary of Samaritan Aramaic, the first dictionary of its kind, contains the vocabulary of the Aramaic dialect in which the Samaritans composed their texts, from the beginning of their literature in the fourth century C.E. when Aramaic was the community’s vernacular, until the end of the use of Aramaic in the eleventh century, when it was replaced by Arabic.
Over a period of more than fifteen years the author has exhaustively collected material form the Samaritans’ translations of the Pentateuch, their liturgy, literary compositions, chronicles, etc., as presented in the growing corpus of scholarly editions. Comparative material from adjacent Palestinian Aramaic dialects is adduced where functional. With ample linguistic and textual notes.
Particularly important for the study of Aramaic Jewish and Christian sources composed during the Roman and Byzantine periods in the Land of Israel, and an absolute must for Biblical Scholars.
Entries in Samaritan-Aramaic (Hebrew block script); English translations; Hebrew translations; bibliographical abbreviations, etc., in English.

What, in Judaism - a religion so concerned with social norms and public policy - can we possibly mean by "law"? That is the thoroughly fresh perspective with which this work commences. It proceeds with two chapters on Second Temple Judaism, and two on the special subject of the Dead Sea library.
Learning withers when criticism is substituted by political consensus, and when other than broadly accepted viewpoints find a hearing only with difficulty, if at all. The editors, therefore, invited colleagues from the USA, Europe, and the State of Israel to systematically outline their views in one account and set it alongside contrary ones. The several participants explain how, in broad and sweeping terms, they see the state of learning in their areas of special interest.
The volume provides first an overview, followed by a systematic, critical account of the fading consensus. In a number of accounts, the different perspectives are presented in scholarly debate. *** Because of the willingness of contending parties to meet one another in a single frame of discourse, the work is able to portray with considerable breadth the presently contending viewpoints concerning the use of Rabbinical literature for historical purposes. *** Besides this sustained and vigorous debate, precipitated by historical-critical reading of the rabbinical literature, other issues have attracted attention, such as, for example, feminist interests.

Thirteen foremost scholars describe the views of death, life after death, resurrection, and the world-to-come set forth in the literary evidence for late antique Judaism. The volume covers the vie w of Scripture as a whole as against other Israelite writings; distinct parts of Scripture such as Psalms and the Wisdom literature; apocalyptic and the non-apocalyptic pseudepigraphic literature, Philo; Josephus; the Dead Sea Scrolls; earliest Christianity (the Gospels in particular); the Rabbinic sources; the Palestinian Targums to the Pentateuch; and, out of material culture, the inscriptional evidence.
The result is both to highlight the range of available perspectives on this important issue and to illuminate a central problem in the study of Judaism in late antiquity, phrased neatly as “One Judaism or many?” Here we place on display indicative components of Judaism in their full diversity, leaving it for readers to determine whether the notion of a single, coherent religion falls under the weight of a mass of documentary contradictions or whether an inner harmony shines forth from a repertoire of largely shared and only superficially-diverse data.

Condensing research concerning questions of religion which encompass the social history of ideas and the religious uses of language, this book deals with three questions: the relationship of the Mishnah to Scripture, the relationship of the religious ideas people hold to the world in which they live, and the religious meaning of the formalization of language that characterizes the Mishnah in particular.
In discussing how the Mishnah relates to Scripture - in the (later) mythic language of Rabbinic Judaism: "the oral Torah" to "the written Torah" - a complete analysis is presented, based on a systematic application of a single taxonomic program. Then an examination is made of how the stages in the unfolding of the Halakhah of the Mishnah relate to the principal events of the times, which delineate those stages. Here focus is given to those pre-70 C.E. components of the Halakhah that later come to the surface in the Mishnah, but discussion extends to the periods from the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. to the Bar Kokhba War, concluded in ca. 135 C.E., then from the reconstruction, 135 C.E., to the closure of the Mishnah, 200 C.E. Finally attention is given to methods of interpreting the rhetorical forms of the Mishnah in the context of the social culture laid bare by the socio-linguistics of the documents concerned.

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Some 25 years ago the famous nine-volume Grundrisz der Medizin der alten Ägypter by Hildegard von Deines e.a. (eds.) saw the light. One of the editors was Professor Dr. Wolfhart Westendorf, the author of the new Handbuch der altägyptischen Medizin now published in Brill's series Handbook of Oriental Studies.
At last the present handbook offers the readership an abridged and revised edition of the old Grundrisz. It deals with Ancient Egyptian Medicine from the second millennium up to the Roman period.
In selecting the material for this volume the author based himself not only on the extant papyrus texts (both hieratic and demotic), but also on relevant passages from Egyptian literature like magical texts and ostraka and on archaeological evidence (mummies, represenations of patients).
After an Introduction (science, religion, magic), there are chapters on sources, formal organisation of the underlying texts, patients and diseases, the physician (profession, social status, title, methods of treatment, dealing with drugs, using magic power, etc.) on the end of Egyptian medicine in Coptic and Greek medicine, and the Ebers and Smith Papyri (with translations). The work concludes with extensive indices (places, themes, etc.)

This volume contains all the known Old Syriac inscriptions from Edessa and the area around Osrhoene in Northern Mesopotamia from the first three centuries C.E., the number of which has substantially increased over the last decades. The texts are given in estrangelo script and are accompanied by an extensive philological and historical commentary. The originals are presented in photographs and line drawings. The volume also contains chapters on the script of these inscriptions, on the language and on the history and culture of Edessa.
Two appendices offer the texts of three parchments written in Syriac and originating from the same area, and of known but still unpublished inscriptions. The book concludes with indices of words and proper names, which are complement to the Dictionary of the North-West Semitic Inscriptions (Brill, 1995), and with a full bibliography.

Over the past seven decades, the scores of publications on Ugarit in Northern Syria (15th to 11th centuries BCE) are so scattered that a good overall view of the subject is virtually impossible. Wilfred Watson and Nicolas Wyatt, the editors of the present Handbook in the series Handbook of Oriental Studies, have brought together and made accessible this accumulated knowledge on the archives from Ugarit, called 'the foremost literary discovery of the twentieth century' by Cyrus Gordon.
In 16 chapters a careful selection of specialists in the field deal with all important aspects of Ugarit, such as the discovery and decipherment of a previously unknown script (alphabetic cuneiform) used to write both the local language (Ugaritic) and Hurrian and its grammar, vocabulary and style; documents in other languages (including Akkadian and Hittite), as well as the literature and letters, culture, economy, social life, religion, history and iconography of the ancient kingdom of Ugarit. A chapter on computer analysis of these documents concludes the work. This first such wide-ranging survey, which includes recent scholarship, an extensive up-to-date bibliography, illustrations and maps, will be of particular use to those studying the history, religion, cultures and languages of the ancient Near East, and also of the Bible and to all those interested in the background to Greek and Phoenician cultures.

Being direct descendants of the Aramaic spoken by the Jews in antiquity, the still spoken Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects of Kurdistan deserve special and vivid interest. Geoffrey Khan’s A Grammar of Neo-Aramaic is a unique record of one of these dialects, now on the verge of extinction.
This volume, the result of extensive fieldwork, contains a description of the dialect spoken by the Jews from the region of Arbel (Iraqi Kurdistan), together with a transcription of recorded texts and a glossary.
The grammar consists of sections on phonology, morphology and syntax, preceded by an introductory chapter examining the position of this dialect in relation to the other known Neo-Aramaic dialects. The transcribed texts record folktales and accounts of customs, traditions and experiences of the Jews of Kurdistan.

The Mishnah - the second-century law code that lays the foundation, after Scripture, of normative Judaism - encompasses all subjects that pertain to the life of the Jewish nation and as such provides a systematic basis for Israel's social order and world view. Any social program has its own politics, economics, and philosophy which together define a given social entity rather than any other. And any system defining the structure of a society strives to establish a set of harmonised and coherent fundamental principles, viewpoints and attitudes in treating the components of its theory of the community. It has been long shown that the Mishnah is such a well-composed theory of world-construction. It is demonstrated here how its specific message concerning the politics and economics that define the social order recapitulate those of Aristotle.

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Astronomy and astrology, or the astral sciences, played an enormous, if not a key role in the political and religious life of the Ancient Near East, and, later, of the Greek and Roman world. This is the first comprehensive and up-to-date account of the origins of the astral sciences in the Ancient Near East.
Every type of Sumerian or Akkadian text dealing with descriptive or mathematical astronomy, including many individual tablets are thoroughly dealt with. All aspects, such as the history of discovery, reconstruction, and interpretation come to the fore, accompanied by a full bibliography. At that the reader will find descriptions of astronomical contents, an explanation of their scientific meaning and the place a given genre or tablet has in the development of astronomy both within the Mesopotamian culture and outside of it. Because celestial omens are intimately related to astronomy in Mesopotamian science, these are also discussed extensively.
The material is arranged both chronologically and thematically, so as to help make Astral Sciences in Mesopotamia a reference work on the subject in its truest sense.

Jewish Diaspora in Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods from first to the eighth centuries C.E. is the subject of this work. The author thoroughly investigates origin, symbolism and significance of the mainly synagogal and funerary art forms in the Diaspora.
Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Diaspora is the companion volume to the successful Ancient Jewish Art and Archeaeology in the Land of Israel (1988) by the same author.
The geographical area covered includes Syria, Asia Minor, North Africa and Mediterranean Europe.
The first section examines the characteristic features of Diaspora Art synagogue architecture and art (including the Torah shrine and mosaic pavements). Another section deals with burial and funerary practices. Of special importance are the sections on the Biblical scenes, designs and iconography of the Dura Europos synagogue, and the Jewish symbols such as the Menorah, ritual objects, the Ark, the conch and the Torah Scrolls.
The book is richly illustrated with more than 325 drawings and photographs, some in colour.

The Anatolian people of the Hittites (ca. 1700-1200 B.C.) are the subject of the underlying work. In recent decades scholars have increased our knowledge in the field enormously without bringing the new insights together in a new comprehensive handbook. This long-awaited handbook deals with the whole of the influential political history of the Hittite Empire.
After an introduction on the natural conditions of Anatolia, chapters follow on the Hittite history of the early period, the old kingdom of the Hittites, the 'middle' kingdom and, extensively, the new kingdom or empire period.
The book is organized chronologically, and each chapter starts with a section on the sources and secondary literature, followed by the actual text on the subsequent periods.
In a separate chapter Professor Fiorella Imparati offers a survey on the political structure of the Hittite Kingdom and its foreign policy.
Chronological tables, a bibliography arranged by the subsequent periods, a section on problems, and several illustrations conclude this important volume.
Given the tremendous amount of material and its lucid organisation this will be one of the few reference works on the Hittites for years to come.

The people of the Hittites (ca. 1700-1200 B.C.) have been the object of serious study for more than eighty years now. Consequently our knowledge of these Indo-European Anatolians has grown at an enourmous pace. One may therefore rigthly conclude that the flow of scholarly literature in monographs, journal articles, Festschriften etc. has reached a point where hardly any scholar can claim an overview anymore.
This systematic bibliography of Hittitology covers the scholarly production from 1915-1995. The authors have aimed at exhaustiveness for Hittitologists. As Hittitology can not be isolated from the studies of adjacent contemporary (Anatolian) peoples, also relevant important contributions on for example the Chatti, Churrites, Luwians and other cultures have been taken into account.
The work is divided into nine chapters: 1. General (Reference Works, Festschrifte, Congresses, etc.); 2. Archaeology, Anthropology, Collections; 3. Script, Epigraphy; 4. Language and Philology, Ethnic Groups; 5. Geography; 6. Social Relations; 7. History; 8. Religion; 9. Cultural History.
With geographical index and an index of authors and reviewers.

'A reliable bibliography is one of the basic elements for every serious library.'

The Systematische Bibliographie der Hethitologie 1915-1995 was compiled by Vladimír Sou_ek and Jana Siegelová, and originally published with cooperation of the Prague Narodni Museum. The work is distributed exclusively by Brill and has been incorporated in the series Handbook of Oriental Studies 1.

This collection of systematic Auseinandersetzungen articulates difference and spells out what is at issue. Learning atrophies when political consensus substitutes for criticism, and when other than broadly-accepted viewpoints, approaches, and readings find a hearing only with difficulty, if at all. The editors therefore have invited colleagues systematically to outline their views in an Auseinandersetzung with contrary ones. The several participants explain how, in broad and sweeping terms, they see the state of learning in their areas of special interest. The editors invited leading players in the USA, Europe, and the State of Israel, in the study of ancient Judaism, both in Second Temple Times and after 70 C.E.
The work commences with a thoroughly fresh perspective of a theoretical question: what, in a religion so concerned with social norms and public policy, can we possibly mean by "law" when we speak of law in Judaism. It then proceeds with two chapters on Second Temple Judaism, and two on the special subject of the Dead Sea library. The two papers in the present part provide an overview of matters and a systematic, critical account of the fading consensus, respectively. The next set of papers ought to stand as the definitive account of the diverse viewpoints on a basic question of method. Because of the willingness of contending parties to meet one another in a single frame of discourse, the work is able to portray with considerable breadth the presently-contending viewpoints concerning the use of Rabbinic literature for historical purposes. Then proceed a number of other accounts of how matters look from the perspective of major participants in scholarly debate. At the same time as the requirements of historical-critical reading of the Rabbinic literature precipitated sustained and vigorous debate, other problems have attracted attention. Among these a critical issue emerges in the hermeneutics to govern the reading of the documents for the purposes of other-than-historical study, feminist interests, for example.

To find your way in the vast Hittite Pantheon is by no means an easy task. In his Onomasticon of the Hittite Pantheon Ben van Gessel lists all Hittite gods as known from primary sources. Their names are listed as written in Hittite, Sumerian and Akkadian. Moreover, deities not mentioned by a proper name are given. The work ends with the unclassifiable fragments of names.
Apart from answering questions about the (often confusing) orthography of the gods' names, each entry categorizes information on their epithets, shrines, priests and servants, cult places, attributes and feasts, as well as about the actual locations in the texts. Where necessary, the author refers to relevant literature.

The individual character of Kingdom of Kush has often been overshadowed by the overwhelming cultural presence of its neighbour Egypt. This handbook in our series "Handbuch der Orientalistik/Handbook of Oriental Studies" for the first time presents a comprehensive survey of the rich textual, archaeological and art historical evidence for this Middle Nile Region Kingdom of Kush.
Basing itself both on the evidence and scholarly literature, this work discusses the emergence of the native state of Kush (after the Pharaonic domination in the 11th century B.C.), the rule of the Kings of Kush in Egypt (c. 760-656) and the intellectual foundations and political history of the Kingdom in the Napatan (7th - 3rd centuries) and Meroitic (3rd century B.C. - 4th century A.D.) periods.

This work contains indexes of the proper names and the subjects of the Great Commentary of Faẖr al-Dîn al-Râzî, which comprises 32 volumes and forms an immense encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, invaluable for the knowledge of Classical Islam.
The work is based on the Beirut edition (1981), but it contains a synopsis which allows for the use of the editions of Cairo (1933) and Teheran (n.d.).
In the introduction, one finds a synthesis of the text's important elements, the statement of exegetical principles of the Great Commentary, and information relating to its chronology and authorship.

In the 9th century, a secret sect of the Ismā‘īlīs -- known in the Middle Ages under the name of Fatimids -- arose to play a prominent role in the history of the Near East. Their supreme head today is the Agha Khan. In this mesmerising book, Heinz Halm describes the early history of the Fatimids, from the founding and spread of the secret society to the rise of the caliphal dynasty to power in North Africa and the founding of Cairo, their capital.

This four-volume reference work deals with the language of the Amarna letters written by scribes who had adopted a peculiar dialect mixture of Accadian and West Semitic syntax. In addition to the texts from Canaan, a few from Alashia are included along with the texts from Kamed el-Loz and Taanach.
Each of the first three volumes is written as a separate monograph; together they treat the problems of morphology and syntax. The first volume covers writing, pronouns and nouns (substantives, adjectives and numerals); the second volume treats the verbal system; and the third volume discusses particles and adverbs with a chapter on word order. The fourth volume includes the bibliography and index to the set.
Since these texts are the earliest witness to West Semitic syntax, they are an invaluable source for the historical study of the North West Semitic family, including biblical Hebrew.

The dictionary offers a complete compilation and a historical-comparative reflection of the hereditary lexis of the Kartvelian (South Caucasian) language family. It represents the latest stage of etymological research, contains a wealth of new lexical entries, corrections of earlier attempts and new reconstructions. The introduction provides a survey of general data of the four Kartvelian languages (Georgian, Mingrelian, Laz, Svan), characterizes the historical-comparative research in short and provides a detailed description of the system of regular phoneme correspondences. The main chapter presents the Kartvelian lexis in separate entries. The reconstructed forms of the root- and affix morphemes are listed in alphabetical order followed by instances of the Kartvelian languages. Each entry covers the phonological development of the lexical item from its original form to its present state and is supplemented by references.

Al-Farrāʾ's philological commentary, Maʿānī l-Qurʾān, dating from the beginning of the 9th century, is a rich source for Qurʾān readings, Qurʾān codices, Qurʾān commentary, Arabic lexicography and grammar. This commentary is unique, being the only extant extensive work by a grammarian of the Kūfan school.
The Lexicon contains about 3,000 terms and compound terms of grammar, lexicography, commentary, hadith and other Islamic sciences. Each term is presented with an English definition, often followed by an English summary. After the English section, extensive quotations from the original text are adduced in Arabic. Thus, the reader is given easy access to the contexts in which the term occurs.

Geschichte der hethitischen Religion presents the first comprehensive representation of the religious history of the Hittites, using both cuneiform and archaeological sources of the Ancient Near East, as from the beginning of the Neolithic until the end of the era of the Hittite Great Kingdom around 1150 B.C.
Special attention will be paid to Ancient Near Eastern cosmologies, the Hittite Kingship and the world of the gods. The book will lead the reader from 'national' to regional divinities and from 'types' of gods, local numina, divine attributes and symbols to the cultic inventory. A fascinating insight in sacrificial practices, in myths and popular religious customs renders the reader a comprehensive overview of the Hittite festive calendar.
A historical survey will give the reader the essential reference.

These two volumes introduce the sources of Judaism in late antiquity to scholars in adjacent fields, such as the study of the Old and New Testaments, ancient history of Classical Antiquity, earliest Christianity, the ancient Near East, and the history of religion. Here, in two volumes, leading American, Israeli, and European specialists in the history, literature, theology, and archaeology of Judaism offer factual answers to the two questions that the study of any religion in ancient times must raise. The first is, what are the sources — written and in material culture — that inform us about that religion? The second is, how do we understand those sources in the reconstruction of the history of various Judaic systems in antiquity. The chapters set forth in simple statements, intelligible for non-specialists, the facts the sources provide. Because of the nature of the subject and acute interest in it, we also raise some questions particular to the study of Judaism, those dealing with its historical relationship with nascent Christianity in New Testament times. The work forms the starting point for the study of all the principal questions concerning Judaism in late antiquity and sets forth the most current, critical results of scholarship.

This bibliography offers a new and indispensable tool for both researchers and practitioners in the field of Islamic law. It supplements the bibliographies published by Joseph Schacht (1964) and John Makdisi (1987) and includes some 1,600 Western-language publications which have appeared between 1980 and 1993. It contains a general and a regional section. With regard to the latter, the main focus is on the Middle East (including Afghanistan and North Africa), although publications in South and Southeast Asia have also been included. In order to facilitate its use, an authors' index and a subject index have been added.

The Hamito-Semitic Etymological Dictionary, a project in the making since 1986, is the first dictionary to reflect the vocabulary of the extinct Proto-Hamito-Semitic (Proto-Afro-Asiatic) language. Reconstructed on the basis of Semitic, Ancient Egyptian, Berber, Chadic and Cushitic linguistic groups, the Dictionary plays an indispensable role in further research into the field of historical linguistics. It surpasses by far the only comparable work to date, M. Cohen's Essai comparatif sur le vocabulaire et la phonetique du chamito-semitique, published in 1947, which contains much less material and is now outdated.
The Dictionary comprises more than 2,500 lexical items and includes an introduction providing valuable information on the historical phonology of Hamito-Semitic as well as an index of meanings, which supplies linguistics, archaeologists and scholars of ancient history with added insight into the culture of the ancient speakers of Proto-Hamito-Semitic. An invaluable contribution to the field of Afro-Asiatic Studies, The Hamito-Semitic Etymological Dictionary will be used and discussed by scholars for years to come.

This collective volume is devoted to the Phoenician and the Punic civilization studied for its own purpose but also for its relationship with contemporaneous cultures of the ancient Mediterranean.
The first part discusses the various sources relating to the Phoenician and Punic world; a second part attempts to sum up the different facets of its material and cultural surrounding. The third part expounds the present state of our knowledge of the Phoenicians and the Punics in each of the large geographical areas where they have emerged.
The work thus assembles clearly, conveniently and as completely as possible the basic facts that will allow specialists of fellow disciplines to initiate themselves, and well-informed researchers to complete or check easily their information. This volume includes a bibliography, illustrations, maps and indexes.

This two-volume work is a comprehensive collection of the pictorial sources for sport in Pharaonic Egypt. Adopting a broad definition of sport, its scope embraces relevant cultic scenes as well as archery, charioteering and horsemanship, hunting, wrestling, open-air games and board games, acrobatics, dancing and water sports.
Over 2,000 documents are given detailed descriptions, with systematic annotations relating to the place, date and content of the documents, as well as the most important secondary literature. The hieroglyphic captions are given in transcription and translation. A representative selection of the pictorial documents, accounting for approximately half of the total material, is presented in the illustrated volume. Accompanying maps classify the material by subject area with indications of their topographical distribution and chronological proximity.
The publication of this corpus of materials makes available for the first time the complete pictorial tradition of a great, ancient sporting culture, the intention being to stimulate and intensify research in these fields by the provision of the basic materials.

This volume introduces the sources of Judaism in late antiquity to scholars in adjacent fields, such as the study of the Old and New Testaments, Ancient History, the ancient Near East, and the history of religion. In two volumes, leading American, Israeli, and European specialists in the history, literature, theology, and archaeology of Judaism offer factual answers to the two questions that the study of any religion in ancient times must raise. The first is, what are the sources — written and in material culture — that inform us about that religion? The second is, how have we to understand those sources in reconstructing the history of various Judaic systems in antiquity. The chapters set forth in simple statements, intelligible to non-specialists, the facts which the sources provide. Because of the nature of the subject and acute interest in it, the specialists also raise some questions particular to the study of Judaism, dealing with its historical relationship with nascent Christianity in New Testament times. The work forms the starting point for the study of all the principal questions concerning Judaism in late antiquity and sets forth the most current, critical results of scholarship.

The civilisation of medieval Muslim Spain is perhaps the most brilliant and prosperous of its age and has been essential to the direction which civilisation in medieval Europe took.
This volume is the first ever in any language to deal in a really comprehensive manner with all major aspects of Islamic civilisation in medieval Spain.