Felix Hoflmayer – författare

This new volume brings together papers given at the Middle Bronze Age in the Southern Levant Revisited: Chronology and Connections session of the Annual Meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research in San Antonio, Texas, in November 2016. The goal of the session was to stimulate a renewed discussion on Middle Bronze Age chronology for the southern Levant and its connections with Egypt, as several recent radiocarbon sequences from several sites challenge current chronological assessments and, thus, correlations with the historical chronology of Egypt. Changing the chronology of the Middle Bronze Age would have significant impact on current views on history and development of Near Eastern societies during the first half of the second millennium BCE. The articles assembled here give a first impression of this debate about historical trajectories, absolute chronology, and how discussion might develop in the future.

During the late third millennium BC one of the biggest transformations of the ancient Near East took place, affecting almost all regions from Egypt to Anatolia and from the Mediterranean Sea to the Iranian plateau. This period not only saw the collapse of urbanization in the southern Levant at the end of the Early Bronze Age III and the following pastoral Intermediate Bronze, and the rise and decline of the Akkad empire in the Upper Euphrates region, but also the end of the Egyptian Old Kingdom in the Nile valley. In recent years it has been argued that climatic reasons, especially rapid climate change in the late third millennium BC (the so-called 4.2 ka BP event) might have triggered this supraregional collapse in western Asia and Egypt, linking it to a period of aridification and cooling. This volume compiles papers presented at the tenth annual Oriental Institute Postdoctoral Seminar, held on March 7-8, 2014. Three major topics are covered: The radiocarbon evidence for the mid to late third millennium BC Near East, the chronological implications of new dates and how historical/archaeological chronologies should/could be adapted, and - based on this evidence - if and how climate change can be related to transitions in the late Early Bronze Age. Furthermore, written sources concerning late Early Bronze Age Near Eastern interrelations and/or transformation and collapse from Egypt to Syria/Mesopotamia are taken into account.