Laura Battini – författare

This book brings together the main discussions that took place at an international conference on the iconology of war in the ancient Near East, a subject never addressed at an international meeting before. The articles span the 3rd to the 1st millennium, with a special stress on the Neo-Assyrian period. They try to respond to many questions about representations of war: what is ‘warrior’ iconography and on what basis it can be defined? Did the war scenes follow a specific directory whereby they adopted the most varied forms? Can we determine the most usual conditions for the creation of pictures of wartime (such as periods of great change)? Were the war scenes referring to specific historical events or were they generic representations? What can a society accept from the representations of war? What did war images silence and why? What is a ‘just’ punishment for enemies and thus the ‘just’ representation of it? Who has control of the representation and therefore also the memory of war? Who is the real subject of war representations? What emerges from all the articles published here is the relevance of textual data in any analysis of iconological material. And this is not only true for iconology, but for all the archaeological material discovered at historical sites.

This volume is a tribute to the career of Professor Olivier Rouault who has conducted extensive research in the fields of both Assyriology and Ancient Near Eastern archaeology. The book is composed of 25 papers written by his colleagues, friends and former students from Belgium, France, Great Britain, Italy, Israel, Japan, The Netherlands, Poland, Syria and the United States. The contributions presented here combine archaeological, iconographic and Assyriological studies from the Neolithic to the 1st millennium BC, covering whole of Mesopotamia and regions of Anatolia and the Levant. Nine papers deal with the data of Terqa, Mari and Qasr Shemamok, sites close to Professor Olivier Rouault’s main field of research. He published cuneiform tablets from Mari and Terqa and worked as a director of archaeological missions at Terqa and Qasr Shemamok. The book is divided into six main topics: Palace and Administration, Temples and Cults, Families and Societies, Literatures and Historiography, Representation and Symbolic Aspects, Cultural Markers and Stratigraphy – all the topics that attracted Professor Olivier Rouault during his fruitful career. More intimate texts recounting memories of moments shared with Olivier punctuate the reading of these contributions.

Ash-sharq is a journal devoted to short articles on the archaeology, history and society of the Ancient Near East.

Image and Identity in the Ancient Near East: Papers in memoriam Pierre Amiet gathers the papers of two colloquia – one held in Pierre Amiet’s honour in Lyon in 2016 and the other held in Paris in 2017, as well as articles by colleagues who wished to dedicate a final tribute to him. The volume consists of two parts. The studies in the first part analyse the body as a biological entity as well as a social, sexual and cultural identity (persona). They show the emotional power of images, the means and media used to achieve this suggestive power, and the different audiences that are the privileged recipients of the different types of production. They also investigate the emotions as they are expressed through the gestures and attitudes of the characters represented. The second part includes articles that are more closely related to the themes that Pierre Amiet has tackled. Two articles deal with his favourite research theme, glyptics. One article takes up the problem of the formation of the state which Pierre Amiet had dealt with in several of his glyptic studies. Other papers are concerned with the organisation of craftsmen and statuary.

Ash-sharq is a journal devoted to short articles on the archaeology, history and society of the Ancient Near East.

Research into furniture has been neglected by archaeologists. Fixed installations lack clear definitions and are often subjectively identified. These studies pay tribute to the late Jean-Claude Margueron, and consider furniture by exploring spatial perception, functionality, and architectural complexities.

Ash-sharq: Bulletin of the Ancient Near East Vol. 9 Nos. 1–2 (2025) brings together the journal’s two 2025 issues in a single printed volume, offering a wide-ranging collection of studies on the archaeology, art, history, and societies of the Near East from prehistory to the Ottoman period. Contributions address funerary architecture and socio-economic dynamics in northern Kuwait, scientific analysis of Neo-Elamite metalwork, domestic architecture in eighteenth-century Damascus, and religious objects from Byzantine and post-Byzantine Cilicia. Further articles explore Mesopotamian deities and iconography, the reception of Babylon in modern media, glyptic imagery, Halaf-period ceramics, and social history in Presargonic Ĝirsu. Several studies focus on the Koya/Koisanjaq region of Iraq, combining archaeological survey, long-term chronology, oral history, and memory studies to examine borderland dynamics across millennia. Together, the volume highlights the journal’s interdisciplinary approach and its engagement with both material and interpretive methodologies.

In all societies, ancient and modern, animals have been of great importance to humans, being used for sustenance, transport, entertainment and emotional fulfilment. In the Ancient Near East, the cradle of domestication, the relationship between humans and animals was much stronger than it is today. The fascination animals exert on humans and the relationships between them are the subject of this book, the result of several workshops organized during the ASOR congress, where archaeologists, researchers specialising in iconography, historians, Assyriologists and archaeozoologists came together to exchange views and achieve a broader understanding of animals. Although our desired perspective is from that of the animal, in Mesopotamia the gaze is always the human one.The book is divided in two parts: the first is devoted to small animals (birds, snakes, lizards and mongooses). The second part concerns animals worthy of the king, such as deer, lions and dogs. The articles cover the period from the end of the 3rd millennium BC to the Sassanid and Roman/Byzantine periods, with a particular emphasis on the first and second millennia BC.