Occasional Publications

Follow

• 

  Women at the Dawn of History

  Agnete Wisti Lassen and Klaus Wagensonner

  This lavishly illustrated volume gives a voice to women who lived millennia ago in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq, Syria and Turkey, and explores their roles, representations and contributions to society.

  Tens of thousands of cuneiform texts, monumental sculptures, and images on terracotta reliefs and cylinder seals cast light on the fates of women at the dawn of history, from queens to female slaves. In the patriarchal world of ancient Mesopotamia, women were often represented in their relation to men—as mothers, daughters, or wives—giving the impression that a woman’s place was in the home. But, as we explore in this volume, they were also authors and scholars, astute business-women, sources of expressions of eroticism, priestesses with access to major gods and goddesses, and regents who exercised power on behalf of kingdoms, states, and empires.

  This volume accompanies an exhibition at the Babylonian Collection in the Sterling Memorial Library, showcasing artefacts and texts relating to women, many never exhibited or published before.

  Agnete W. Lassen is associate curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. Klaus Wagensonner is a post-doctoral researcher at Yale University.

• 

  Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks: Highlights of the Yale Babylonian Collection

  Agnete W. Lassen, Eckart Frahm, and Klaus Wagensonner

  A stunning guide to the treasures housed within the Yale Babylonian Collection, presenting new perspectives on the society and culture of the ancient Near East.

  
  The Yale Babylonian Collection houses virtually every genre, type, and period of ancient Mesopotamian writing, ranging from about 3000 B.C.E. to the early Christian Era. Among its treasures are tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh and other narratives, the world's oldest recipes, a large corpus of magic spells and mathematical texts, stunning miniature art carved on seals, and poetry by the first named author in world history, the princess Enheduana.
  
  This unique volume, the companion book to an exhibition at the Yale Peabody Museum, celebrates the Yale Babylonian Collection and its formal affiliation with the museum. Included are essays by world-renowned experts on the exhibition themes, photographs and illustrations, and a catalog of artifacts in the collection that present the ancient Near East in the light of present-day discussion of lived experiences, focusing on family life and love, education and scholarship, identity, crime and transgression, demons, and sickness.

• 

  Note Book of Archaeological Travel

  James B. Nies

  Travel diary of the Rev. James B. Nies detailing his travel to the Holy Land in 1898.