This fourth volume in a collection based on the biennial interdisciplinary meetings held in Kultepe, ancient Kane, draws together sixteen contributions that explore the archaeology and history of this site, with the ongoing aim of taking a holistic approach to revitalizing this important early Anatolian cultural centre. The papers gathered here present both current research and recent important results derived from research in Kultepe and its wider surroundings through four key thematic strands: cultural exchanges between this site and its environs; material culture; sealings, writings, and history; comparisons with other sites across Central Anatolia. Through this approach, this volume is able to explore not only the historical importance of Kultepe, but also to highlight the settlement's future importance as a pilot site for interdisciplinary studies, thanks to its unique textual and archaeological data.

The eleven contributions in this book address the history of contacts and exchanges in the Bronze and Iron Ages within West Asia, extending far beyond the boundaries of the previously defined contact zone of the ‘Ancient Near East’.

Ever since the early 2nd millennium BCE, Pre-Classical Anatolia has been a crossroads of languages and peoples. Indo-European peoples – Hittites, Luwians, Palaeans – and non-Indo-European ones – Hattians, but also Assyrians and Hurrians – coexisted with each other for extended periods of time during the Bronze Age, a cohabitation that left important traces in the languages they spoke and in the texts they wrote. By combining, in an interdisciplinary fashion, the complementary approaches of linguistics, history, and philology, this book offers a comprehensive, state-of-the-art study of linguistic and cultural contacts in a region that is often described as the bridge between the East and the West. With contributions by Paola Cotticelli-Kurras, Alfredo Rizza, Maurizio Viano, and Ilya Yakubovich.

Manuscript cultures have frequently forgotten, neglected, or even erased women's contributions from memory. Women's agency has also been a glaring blind spot in the scholarly pursuit of gender perspectives on the production of written artefacts. This volume addresses these lacunae by highlighting manuscripts and inscriptions by and for women, their active participation and enabling sponsorship, and their role in the circulation and dissemination of written artefacts. Seven papers present case studies from East Asian inscriptions to ancient cuneiform epigraphic, Egyptian graffiti from late antiquity to individual specimen and large-scale collections in medieval Europe, focusing on how women participated in and contributed to those. How did they assert their involvement, their claims and their aspirations? By what rationales and mechanisms were they excluded or their contribution marginalised? How did they react to structures that discriminated against them, eventually circumventing, subverting and transforming them? The present volume sheds light on new findings, gives unique insights and discusses methodological considerations in the budding field of women's manuscript studies.

The material remains and the more than 23,500 cuneiform tablets unearthed at the site of Kultepe (ancient Kanesh) shed light on social, political, and economic aspects of the Middle Bronze age (ca. 2000-1700 years BC) in central Anatolia, but also in Upper Mesopotamia. The rich textual record provides ample information on a very sophisticated supraregional market economy, representing one of the best-documented historical cases of long-distance trade in the ancient world. Although the site was first excavated in 1893, followed by intermittent excavations between 1906 and 2005, modern scientific and interdisciplinary excavations have only been undertaken since 2006. The new scientific research at Kultepe-Kanesh has already begun amassing new data and providing us with a unique opportunity to generate new perspectives and to challenge previous models and assumptions about, for example, trade, colonialism, ethnicity, art, religious ideas, identity, and patterns of social, political, and economic organization in the Near East during the Middle Bronze Age. A primary goal of this special volume is to integrate the work of scholars in archaeology, archaeometry, bioarchaeology, geoarchaeology, and history to develop a new synthetic research paradigm for investigating issues of trade, colonialism, ethnicity, art, identity, and urbanization in the Near East in a unified fashion.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems, DAS 2022, held in La Rochelle, France, in May 2022. The full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions addressing key techniques of document analysis.

This book presents a detailed description of the political, cultural, and economic world of ancient Kanesh (present-day Kültepe, Turkey), a vibrant Bronze Age Anatolian trade outpost and the earliest attested commercial society in world history.