This outstanding book offers a standardized typology and chronology for the pottery of the Jerusalem area from c. 200 to 800 CE with an emphasis on the fourth to seventh centuries. It begins with a review of the stratigraphy and ceramic assemblages of the relevant published sites: the City of David, the north wall of Jerusalem, the Damascus Gate, Bethany, the Armenian Garden and Ramat Rahel. Also presented is previously unpublished late Roman and Byzantine pottery from Avigad's excavations in the Jewish Quarter with a discussion of some of the ceramic types most characteristic of the Jerusalem area during the late Roman, Byzantine and early periods. The last part of the book is a corpus that sets forth a typology for the pottery of Jerusalem from c. 200 to 800CE with dates and lists of parallels provided for each type.

Emil Schürer's Geschichte des judischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi, originally published in German between 1874 and 1909 and in English between 1885 and 1891, is a critical presentation of Jewish history, institutions, and literature from 175 B.C. to A.D. 135. It has rendered invaluable services to scholars for nearly a century. The present work offers a fresh translation and a revision of the entire subject-matter. The bibliographies have been rejuvenated and supplemented; the sources are presented according to the latest scholarly editions; and all the new archaeological, epigraphical, numismatic and literary evidence, including the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bar Kokhba documents, has been introduced into the survey. Account has also been taken of the progress in historical research, both in the classical and Jewish fields. This work reminds students of the profound debt owed to nineteenth-century learning, setting it within a wider framework of contemporary knowledge, and provides a foundation on which future historians of Judaism in the age of Jesus may build.