Luxury, Prestige and Grandeur: the Mansions and Daily Life of the Social Elite of the Roman Near East during the 1st-6th Centuries CE

The time I spent during the past year as the R. and E. Hecht […]

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The Context of Ancient Egyptian Statuary in the Levant

The presence of Egyptian material culture in the Levant has long intrigued scholars in the fields of Levantine archaeology and Egyptology alike as evidence […]

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Migrations or Acculturations?

My research project focused on two problems in the broad context of ongoing studies of settlement history in Crete, which have only been preliminarily touched upon in the past by other […]

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A Comparative Study of the Origins of Cavalry in the Ancient Near East and China

Cavalry was one of the dominant military forces in ancient times. Since its creation, it has played an important role in warfare, and has also had a profound influence […]

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Who is Who in the Ur III Dynasty

Drehem is a small village situated seven kilometers south of Nippur, the religious center of Sumer and Akkad. The site was extensively looted in 1909-1910 and its clay tablets were brought […]

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Biblical Monotheism and Translating the First Commandment in the Chinese Context

Archaeology plays a significant social scientific role in understanding the world of the Bible. During my tenure as a […]

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Pagan Monotheism in the Early Islamic Period

Pagan Monotheism refers to a different (if not independent) type of monotheism than the so-called revealed or Abrahamic monotheism. It is not a spontaneous result of […]

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Continuity & Discontinuity in the LB IIB/Iron I Transition

During the early 20th century, the transition between the Late Bronze IIB and Iron I was characterized as one of discontinuity, based primarily upon the biblical model […]

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Desert Devotions

Imagine the desert. Imagine a place at once desolate and overrun with life, a place where one may only see the horizon for miles and then suddenly a town, a structure, or, perhaps a drawing etched on a rock. Imagine a place […]

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The Fabric of Society: Textile Production Workshops in the Southern Levant

During the academic year, I served as the Ernest S. Frerichs Fellow/Program Coordinator and assisted […]

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Philistine Pottery in the Core and Periphery

The Philistines settled in the southern coastal plain of Israel, in the area that later came to be known as Philistia, in the first half of the 12th century BCE […]

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Tel Miqne-Ekron during the Late Bronze Age

Fourteen seasons of excavation at Tel Miqne (1981 – 1996), under the direction of Professors Trude Dothan and Seymour Gitin, uncovered a series of superimposed […]

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Royal Assassination in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East: A Brief Synopsis

Royal assassinations were not particularly rare events in the ancient world. Indeed, within ancient […]

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New Data on the Chalcolithic Period

Traditionally less scholarly attention has been focused on the southern Levantine 5th and early 4th millennia BCE (the Chalcolithic period, or the “Ghassulian” period after the type site of […]

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Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals

During my stay, I continued to work on the preparation of critical editions and studies of Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals. But I should preface my report on this work […]

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European Steppe Nomads in the Military History of the Near East

During my residence at the Albright Institute as a Seymour Gitin Distinguished Professor (January 2-April 8), I worked on my research project, “Eurasian Steppe Nomads in the Military History […]

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Seeing God(s) in Temples, the Heavens, and in Model Shrines: A Problem in Ancient Metaphysics

In the 21st century, we have access to two types of texts written by ancient Israelites. The first consists of anthologies of poems […]

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Roast and Toast of Retiring Albright Director, Sy Gitin [Video]

At theASOR Annual Meeting, we gathered to celebrate the career of Sy Gitin. Sy became director of the Albright Institute (formerly) […]

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Introduction to Archaeology and the New Testament (Mandarin Language)

There are currently few resources available in the Mandarin language for the study of the archaeology of Israel/Palestine as it relates […]

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Travels Through Time: Imagining Migration in the Early Aegean

As a student, I had travelled and excavated in other parts of the Middle East (Jordan and Lebanon) before, but had never visited Israel […]

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