Life At The Bottom Of Babylonian Society

Life at the Bottom of Babylonian Society is a study of the population dynamics, family structure, and legal status of publicly-controlled servile workers in Kassite Babylonia. It compares some of the demographic aspects proper to this group with other intensively studied past populations, such as Roman Egypt, Medieval Tuscany, and American slave plantations. It suggests that families, especially those headed by single mothers, acted as a counter measure against population reduction (flight and death) and as a means for the state to control this labor force. The work marks a step forward in the use of quantitative measures in conjunction with cuneiform sources to achieve a better understanding of the social and economic forces that affected ancient Near Eastern populations.

The public servile labor force at Nippur can be identified by standard Middle Babylonian markers of sex-age class and physical condition as well as by other distinctive designations (e. g., qinnu, am ilutu) in a corpus of more than five hundred tablets and fragments dating between 1359 and 1224 B.C. This collection of administrative texts, legal documents, and letters partially illuminates for us several key features of this group, including aspects of its demographic composition, its family and household organization, its occupations, and the administrative structure concerned with maintaining, tracking, and controlling the laborers.

"The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East offers a comprehensive and fully illustrated survey of the history of Egypt and Western Asia (Levant, Anatolia, Mesopotamia and Iran) in five volumes, from the emergence of complex states to the conquest of Alexander of Great. The authors represent a highly international mix of leading academics whose expertise brings alive the people, places and times of the remote past. The emphasis lies firmly on the political and social histories of the states and communities under investigation. The individual chapters present the key textual and material sources underpinning the historical reconstruction, giving special attention to the most recent archaeological finds and how they have impacted our interpretation. The first volume covers the long period from the mid-tenth millennium to the late third millennium BC and presents the history of the Near East in ten chapters "From the Beginnings to Old Kingdom Egypt and the Dynasty of Akkad". Key topics include the domestication of animals and plants, the first permanent settlements, the subjugation and appropriation of the natural environment, the emergence of complex states and belief systems, the invention of the earliest writing systems and the wide-ranging trade networks that linked diverse population groups across deserts, mountains and oceans"--

Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA) is an international, peer-reviewed journal that features multidisciplinary scholarship on intersections between visual culture studies and the study of Asian diasporas across the Americas. Perspectives on and from North, Central and South America, as well as the Pacific Islands and the Caribbean are presented in order to encourage a hemispheric transnational approach to diverse visual cultures. Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas is published by Brill (Leiden/Boston) in affiliation with the Asian/Pacific/American Institute, New York University (New York) and the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, Concordia University (Montreal).

On Human Bondage—a critical reexamination of Orlando Patterson’s groundbreaking Slavery and Social Death—assesses how his theories have stood the test of time and applies them to new case studies. Discusses the novel ideas of social death and natal alienation, as Patterson first presented them 35 years ago and as they are understood today Brings together exciting new work by a group of esteemed historians of slavery, as well as a final chapter by Patterson himself that responds to and expands upon the other contributions Provides insights into slave societies around the world and across time, from classical Greece and Rome to modern Brazil and the Caribbean, and from Han China and pre-colonial South Asia to early modern Europe and the New World Delves into a wide range of topics, including the reformation of social identity after slavery, the new historicist approach to slavery, rituals of enslavement and servitude, questions of honor and dishonor, and symbolic imagery of slavery

This volume completes the publication of Middle Babylonian texts from the Rosen Collection that date to the Kassite period, a project that was initiated by Wilfred H. van Soldt with CUSAS 30 in 2015. In this book, Elena Devecchi provides full transliterations, translations, and extended commentaries of 338 previously unpublished cuneiform tablets from Kassite Babylonia (ca. 1475–1155 BCE). Most of the texts are dated to the reigns of Nazi-Maruttaš and Kadašman-Turgu, but the collection also includes one tablet dating to the reign of Burna-Buriaš II and a few documents from the reigns of Kadašman-Enlil II, Kudur-Enlil, and Šagarakti-Šuriaš, as well as some that are not dated. The tablets published here are largely administrative records dealing with the income, storage, and redistribution of agricultural products and byproducts, animal husbandry, and textile production, while legal documents and letters comprise a smaller portion of the collection. Evidence suggests that these documents originated from an administrative center that interacted closely with the provincial capital Nippur and must have been located in its vicinity. They thus expand significantly our previous knowledge of the Nippur region under Kassite rule, hitherto almost exclusively based on sources that came from Nippur itself, and provide substantial new data for the study of central aspects of society, economy, and administration that traditionally lie at the core of research about Kassite Babylonia.

Tracing the evolution of the state from its beginnings to the early Middle Ages, this comprehensive handbook focuses on key institutions and dynamics while providing accessible accounts of states and empires in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean.

Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia explores the earliest historical evidence related to imprisonment in the history of the world. While many historical investigations into prisons have revolved around the important question of punishment, this work moves beyond that more narrow approach to consider the multifunctional practices of detaining the body in ancient Iraq. It is the contention of this book that imprisonment arose out of the desire to control and detain the body in relation to labor. The practice of detainment for coercion became adaptable to a variety of circumstances and goals, which shaped the contexts and practices of imprisonment. With time, religious ideology was attached to imprisonment. In one literary text, a prisoner was refined like silver and given new birth in the prison. The misery of imprisonment gave rise to lament through which a criminal could be ritually purified and restored to a right relationship with their personal god. Beyond this literary perspective, this work reconstructs how imprisonment and religious ideology intersected with the judicial process and explores the evidence related to the reasons behind imprisonment, the treatment of prisoners, and the evidence related to the lengths of their stays.

Have Marxian ideas been relevant or influential in the writing and interpretation of history? What are the Marxist legacies that are now re-emerging in present-day histories? This volume is an attempt at relearning what the “discipline” of history once knew – whether one considered oneself a Marxist, a non-Marxist or an anti-Marxist.

Children were an important part of the ancient Near Eastern household. This idea seems straightforward, but it can be understood in many ways. On a basic level, children are necessary for the perpetuation of a household. On a deeper level, the definitions of child and member of the household are far from categorical. This book begins to explore the multiple definitions of child and the way the child fits within a household. It examines what membership in the household looks like for children and what factors contribute to it. A study addressing what a child is and how a child’s gender and social status affect her place in the household is vital to a proper understanding of the ancient Near Eastern household. Despite their importance, children have long been marginalized in discussions of ancient societies. Only recently has this trend begun to change within biblical and ancient Near Eastern scholarship. A recent wave of studies, especially in relation to the Hebrew Bible, has started to address children in their own right. In light of the current state of scholarship on children, the purpose of this book is threefold. First, Garroway continues to fill out the picture of the child in the ancient Near East by compiling child-centric texts and archaeological realia. In analyzing these materials, she surveys the relationship between children and ancient Near Eastern society by examining the extent to which structuring forces in a community, such as social status and gender, contribute to the process of a child’s becoming a member of his household and society. Finally, this information provides a base for future research, for example, a cross-cultural study of children in the ancient Near East in Classical Antiquity.