Books published by Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures

How did Islam's sacred scripture, the Arabic Qur'an, emerge from western Arabia at a time when the region was religiously fragmented and lacked a clearly established tradition of writing to render the Arabic language? The studies in this volume address different aspects of this question.

Looks at the spread of Islam throughout the medieval world and the process of conversion to this religion and adoption of its cultural life. The evidence is presented in a series of essay reports on archaeological approaches in current Islamic Archaeology.

This two-volume account of archaeological investigations in central and eastern Luristan reflects work carried out over 50 years in the remote area of western Iran, north of the Zagros Mountains. Included are excavation reports on the Chalcolithic site of Kamtarlan and on an Iron Age shrine on the slopes og Surkh Dum-I-Luri mountain.

The Archive of Thotsutmis, Son of Panouphis presents for the first time one of the largest collections of Demotic ostraca to have been discovered intact by archaeologists in the twentieth century. Rarely have such deposits been found in situ. Excavated by Ambrose Lansing on behalf of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1915-16 at the site of Deir el-Bahari, the integrity and context of this find are critical to the proper understanding of the texts it contained. Through the publication and analysis of this archive of Demotic and Greek texts recorded on ostraca, Muhs, Scalf, and Jay reconstruct the microhistory of Thotsutmis, son of Panouphis, and his family, who worked in Egypt on the west bank of Thebes as priests in the mortuary industry during the early Ptolemaic Period in the third century BC. The forty-two ostraca published in this volume provide a rare opportunity to explore the intersections between an intact ancient archive of private administrative documents and the larger social and legal contexts into which they fit. What the reconstructed microhistory reveals is an ancient family striving to make it among the wealthy and connected social network of Theban choachytes and pastophoroi, while they simultaneously navigated the bureaucratic maze of taxes, fees, receipts, and legal procedures of the Ptolemaic state.

Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization 62, OIP 2008.

A number of burials excavated by the Oriental Institute Nubian Expedition revealed pottery, objects, and burial customs that are dated to the Twenty-fifth Dynasty and Napatan periods (ca. 750-200 b.c.). The burials are compared with others published from the region to reconstruct a substantial period of settlement in Lower Nubia.

This volume is the first of twelve scheduled to present the materials excavated under the direction of Professor Keith C. Seele in a concession that extended from the Abu Simbel temples to the Sudan frontier in two seasons, 1962-63 and 1963-64.

Includes all the cuneiform tablets excavated at Tell Abu Salabikh in 1963 and 1965 with the exception of a very few illegible fragments. All other tablets are represented by a copy, by a photograph, or by both. Except for the copies of especially fragile tablets made in the field, preliminary copies were prepared from casts and photographs.

Presents detailed excavation reports on a villa of the early Roman period, a public building on the Street of the Monuments and the City Bath of the Byzantine period and also attempts a survey of Ptolemais of the Libyan Pentapolisas a whole.

The excavation of area WF in the eighteenth and nineteenth seasons at Nippur (1988/89, 1990) was aimed specifically at delineating the transition between the Early Dynastic and Akkadian periods, and this goal has been realised. A

Companion to the 2009 exhibit, traces the life of Meresamun, whose mummy, dating to about 800 B.C., is one of the highlights of the Oriental Institute Museum. The study of the life of this individual is augmented by forensic evidence obtained with the newest generation of CT scanners that sheds life on Meresamun's life and death.

This 2-vol set (text and plates) represents the final publication of the archaeological excavations conducted at Tell es-Sweyhat in the Tabqa Dam region of the upper Euphrates River in Syria under the direction of T. A. Holland during the field seasons of 1973-1975 and 1989-1991. Part 1: text 629pp, Part 2: plates 1-334 808pp.

Details the New Kingdom remains from the Nubian sites of Qustul and Adindan. Nubia prospered, as it was more closely tied to Egypt during this period of its history than at any other time. The Egyptian influence and Nubia's prosperity are clearly depicted in the burials. 206 figures, 53 plates, 24 tables.

This volume, the fifth to publish the results of Seele's two seasons of excavations in Nubia, presents Meroitic materials from two large cemeteries and a small settlement at the southern end of Egyptian Nubia.

The excavations at these cemeteries provide a full range of X-Group objects, dated to the fourth through sixth centuries a.d. Of special interest is the military equipment, including many decorated quivers, parts of several unusual light composite bows, and a saddle date to the late fourth century.

This monograph presents plaster, stone, ceramic, flint and bone remains from one of the largest pre-classical Tells in Syria. An appendix details the Neolithic plant remains.

The second volume of The Excavations in the Plain of Antioch describes a series of excavations in the Syro-Palestinian region. The three sites included in the report are Catal Hueyuek, Tell al-Judaidah and Tell Tayinat, all situated in the central part of the Amuq valley around the city of Rihaniyyah.

In celebration of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago's centennial year, a personalized history of the OI's work past and present. Learn the story of the Institute's development-from being one man's dream to becoming one of the world's pre-eminent authorities on over ten thousand years of human civilization.

This volume of the Hittite Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CHD) is the complete volume of the letter S (-sa to suu-), including fascicles 1-4. The CHD is a comprehensive, bilingual Hittite-English dictionary.

This special edition of Highlights of the Collections of the Oriental Institute Museum commemorates the 2019 centennial of the Oriental Institute and presents 100 highlights from ancient Mesopotamia, Syro-Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt, Nubia, and Persia in the collections.

These Hittite text fragments are part of a large collection found during the early Turkish-German excavations at the Hittite capital Hattusa before the Second World War. This book offers a large number of unpublished text fragments from the collection, both photographed and in transliteration, also providing philological notes to the fragments.

This volume presents new research on the Ancient Near East in areas such as landscape archaeology, urbanism, the ancient languages of Mesopotamia, history of Mesopotamia, the archaeology of Iran and Yemen, prehistory, material culture and wider archaeological topics.