Books published by American Oriental Society

This thorough edition of a Sumerian poem featuring the hero Enmerkar makes use of many newly identified exemplars of the composition. In addition, in his commentary the author makes a good case that story and script were created for performance.

This study reconstructs Mesopotamian geography based primarily on the third-millennium lists of geographical place names found at Abu Salabikh in Mesopotamian and at Ebla in Syria.

This book is the first historical analysis of those parts of Islamic legal theory that deal with the language of revelation, and a milestone in reconstructing the missing history of legal theory in the ninth and tenth centuries. It offers a fresh interpretation of al-Shafii's seminal thought.

Crucifixion and Death as Spectacle explores how the first caliphal dynasty of early Islam, the Umayyads, employed crucifixion to punish brigands and heretics and to humiliate rebels and enemies, and how they drew upon a late antique legacy of punitive practices associated with crucifixion in the Late Roman and Sasanid Persian worlds.

This monograph examines a number of motifs central to the expression of the ideal of sovereignty as it is articulated in Vedic liturgical poetry.

A critical edition based on the three known manuscripts, and translation of a gnomologium entitled Mukhtar min kalam al-hukama' al-arba`a, which contains sayings ascribed to Pythgagoras, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. A paperback reprint of the original 1975 book, with a new Foreword, and with errata and corrections.

David Honey offers a history of Sinology, spanning its beginnings in the first efforts of seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries to the growing disciplinary fragmentation of the field in the second half of the twentieth century. No comprehensive history of the field has heretofore been published in a Western language.

Kioumars Ghereghlou presents an edition, with preface and indexes, of a previously unpublished sixteenth-century Persian chronicle. Written by Qasim Beg Hayati, a court scribe to Shah T ahmasp (r. 1524-76), it covers Safavid history beginning with the early part of the fourteenth century. Main text in Persian, editorial preface in English.