Offering fascinating insights into the people and politics of the ancient near Eastern kingdoms, Trevor Bryce uses the letters of the five Great Kings as the focus of a fresh look at this turbulent and volatile region in the late Bronze Age.

This in-depth exploration of emotions in the ancient Near East illuminates the rich and complex worlds of feelings encompassed within the literary and material remains of this remarkable region, home to many of the world’s earliest cities and empires, and lays critical foundations for future study. Thirty-four chapters by leading international scholars, including philologists, art historians, and archaeologists, examine the ways in which emotions were conceived, experienced, and expressed by the peoples of the ancient Near East, with particular attention to Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and the kingdom of Ugarit, from the Late Uruk through to the Neo-Babylonian Period (ca. 3300–539 BCE). The volume is divided into two parts: the first addressing theoretical and methodological issues through thematic analyses and the second encompassing corpus-based approaches to specific emotions. Part I addresses emotions and history, defining the terms, materialization and material remains, kings and the state, and engaging the gods. Part II explores happiness and joy; fear, terror, and awe; sadness, grief, and depression; contempt, disgust, and shame; anger and hate; envy and jealousy; love, affection, and admiration; and pity, empathy, and compassion. Numerous sub-themes threading through the volume explore such topics as emotional expression and suppression in relation to social status, gender, the body, and particular social and spatial conditions or material contexts. The Routledge Handbook of Emotions in the Ancient Near East is an invaluable and accessible resource for Near Eastern studies and adjacent fields, including Classical, Biblical, and medieval studies, and a must-read for scholars, students, and others interested in the history and cross-cultural study of emotions.

Written by a leading scholar of public diplomacy, Boundary Spanners of Humanity introduces a pan-human vision of communication that can revolutionize how we collaborate to solve global problems. Never before has humanity enjoyed better technological capabilities for interconnection than today. Ironically, rather than benefiting from the global pool of human resources and intellectual wealth to solve shared problems, nations are experiencing public discord and global divisions. Boundary Spanners of Humanity tackles the challenge of how to enhance global collaboration by introducing three pan-human logics of human communication and public diplomacy that can transform how we view diversity in an interconnected world. R.S. Zaharna begins by asking why the very tools needed for global collaboration-communication and public diplomacy-are undermining our efforts to work together. Her research reveals how contemporary communication is based on a nineteenth-century mindset of separateness that divided people into mutually exclusive cultural and national categories. That mindset reinforces human divisions and erodes global collaboration. In a radical break from conventional models, Zaharna introduces a vision of humanity-centered public diplomacy featuring three complementary logics of communication. Zaharna's innovative approach stems from decade-long, interdisciplinary research that spans from ancient cosmologies to emerging neurobiology. She draws on a rich array of global examples from ancient and indigenous precolonial diplomacies to spontaneous online communication during the Covid-19 pandemic to provide insights into overlooked aspects of emotion, empathy, spirituality, and synchrony in how nations and people communicate in the global arena. Ambitiously conceived, this book will bring a new, global understanding of how to conduct public diplomacy for the world's boundary spanners-those who would find commonality among our many divisions-and collaborate on humanity's shared global problems.

For over 40 years, Jack M. Sasson has been studying and commenting on the cuneiform archives from Mari on the Euphrates River, especially those from the age of Hammurabi of Babylon. Among Mari’s wealth of documents, some of the most interesting are letters from and to kings, their advisers and functionaries, their wives and daughters, their scribes and messengers, and a variety of military personnel. The letters are revealing and often poignant. Sasson selects more than 700 letters as well as several excerpts from administrative documents, translating them and providing them with illuminating comments. In distilling a lifetime of study and interpretation, Sasson hopes to welcome readers into a fuller appreciation of a remarkable period in Mesopotamian civilization. Sasson’s presentation is organized around major institutions in an ancient culture: (1) Kingship, treating accumulation of wealth, control of vassals, dynastic marriages, treaty-obligations, as well as illustrating the hazards and vexation of ruling a large territory; (2) Administration, from palaces that teem with bureaucrats, musicians, and cooks, to the management of provinces and vassal kingdoms; (3) Warfare, military establishment and martial practices; (4) Society, including organs of justice (and shortcuts to it), crime, punishment, and civil transactions; (5) Religion, including notices on diverse pantheons, rituals, priesthood, cultic paraphernalia, vows, ordeals, and channels to the gods (divination, dreams, and prophecy); and (6) Culture, including ethnic distinctions, class structure, and moments in the life cycle (birth, childhood, family life, health matters, death, and commemoration). Sasson’s presentation of the material brings to life a world entombed for four millennia, concretizes the realities of ancient life, and gives it a human perspective that is at once instructive and entertaining. The book is accompanied by extensive concordances and indexes (including to biblical passages) that will be useful to those who wish to study the letters more intensively.

Amanda Podany here takes readers on a vivid tour through a thousand years of ancient Near Eastern history, from 2300 to 1300 BCE, paying particular attention to the lively interactions that took place between the great kings of the day. Allowing them to speak in their own words, Podany reveals how these leaders and their ambassadors devised a remarkably sophisticated system of diplomacy and trade. What the kings forged, as they saw it, was a relationship of friends-brothers-across hundreds of miles. Over centuries they worked out ways for their ambassadors to travel safely to one another's capitals, they created formal rules of interaction and ways to work out disagreements, they agreed to treaties and abided by them, and their efforts had paid off with the exchange of luxury goods that each country wanted from the other. Tied to one another through peace treaties and powerful obligations, they were also often bound together as in-laws, as a result of marrying one another's daughters. These rulers had almost never met one another in person, but they felt a strong connection--a real brotherhood--which gradually made wars between them less common. Indeed, any one of the great powers of the time could have tried to take over the others through warfare, but diplomacy usually prevailed and provided a respite from bloodshed. Instead of fighting, the kings learned from one another, and cooperated in peace. A remarkable account of a pivotal moment in world history--the establishment of international diplomacy thousands of years before the United Nations--Brotherhood of Kings offers a vibrantly written history of the region often known as the "cradle of civilization."

In the week between July 21 and 25, 2014, the University of Warsaw hosted more than three hundred Assyriologists from all over the world. In the course of five days, nearly 150 papers were read in three (and sometimes four) parallel sessions. Many of them were delivered within the framework of nine thematic workshops. The publication of most of these panels is underway, in separate volumes. As is usually the case, the academic sessions were accompanied by many opportunities for social interaction among the participants, and there was time to enjoy the historical and cultural benefits of Warsaw. Special honor was accorded to two American Assyriologists whose origins can be traced to Warsaw, Piotr Michalowski and Piotr Steinkeller, and a special session to recognize their contributions to the study of ancient Mesopotamia was organized. In this book are presented papers on the main theme of the meeting, “Fortune and Misfortune in the Ancient Near East.” The 31 essays are organized into 5 sections: (1) plenary presenations on “What Is Fortune? What Is Misfortune?” ; (2) humanity and fortune/misfortune and luck, with discussion of specific examples; (3) additional papers on definitions of fortune and misfortune; (4) the effects on city and state; and (5) God and temple.