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.

Mortals, Deities and Divine Symbols: Rethinking Ancient Imagery from the Levant to Mesopotamia is dedicated to Tallay Ornan, a scholar who has distinguished herself in ancient Western Asian iconographic studies and has become an undisputed reference in this field. It is divided into three parts, which give greater prominence to Tallay Ornan’s major themes: New Discoveries and Approaches in twelve chapters; The Human World (e.g. royals, women) in fourteen chapters; The Divine World (anthropomorphic deities and divine symbols) in eighteen chapters.The chapters discuss iconological and textual problems from the Levant to Mesopotamia, in a chronological span from the third to first millennia BCE.

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.