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The construction of sacred spaces has been shaped throughout millennia by the idea of a divine presence within the realm of human life. In the course of time, manifold and diverse architectural forms have been developed to express the idea of a divine presence at a particular place and to make it tangible there. Thus, religious architecture aims to enable a local and multi-dimensional encounter with the sacred. This volume provides thirteen contributions on temples, synagogues, churches, and mosques from ancient Palestine. These papers show developments within the Southern Levant, from the Early Bronze Age to the Late Islamic periods, related to the construction, use, and abandonment of religious buildings. The main architectural forms of the buildings in the different epochs are highlighted, as well as the continuities and discontinuities of diachronic developments. Symbolic, ideological, and social conceptions of sacred buildings are considered, as well as their communicative, representative, and regional aspects. Numerous plans, drawings, and photographs of the architectural remains and of individual elements (altars, benches, mosaics, columns) serve to illustrate the religious buildings discussed in this volume. A total of twenty-six color plates add to the volume's illustrations.

Avestan is the sacred language of the Zoroastrians in which they perform most of their rituals. It is known only from its use in the rituals of modern Zoroastrians and the manuscripts reproducing these rituals since the 13th century. Although sure dates cannot be provided, it is very likely that the creation of the liturgical corpus extended from the end of the 2nd millennium BCE until the end of the Achaemenid period (4th cent. BCE). This corpus includes texts in at least three linguistic layers (Old, Middle and Young Avestan). The present manual aims to provide a tool for facilitating the teaching of Young Avestan but keeps in mind also the possibility of self-learning since Avestan is not well-represented in the actual academic landscape. It includes a progressive presentation of the complex phonetic evolutions that are very characteristic of the Avestan language as a consequence of the evolution of the recitation until its fixation (6th cent. CE) and also of the Avestan grammar, complemented with exercises including samples of original texts of increasing difficulty. In each lesson, one text is reproduced in a manuscript, introducing the students to the direct work with manuscripts.

Die Geschichtswissenschaft diskutiert seit Jahren intensiv über die Genese, Formen und Folgen weltweiter Verflechtungen und Austauschprozesse. Die Forschungen und Debatten auf dem Feld der Globalgeschichte knüpfen an etablierte Traditionen der außereuropäischen Geschichte, der Geschichte der europäischen Expansion sowie der Geschichte einzelner Weltregionen an, führen jedoch konzeptionell und methodisch über diese hinaus. Dem Wandel des wissenschaftlichen Diskurses trägt die vormalige "Gesellschaft für Überseegeschichte" durch ihre Umbenennung in "Gesellschaft für Globalgeschichte" Rechnung. Im Zuge der konzeptionellen und methodischen Neuausrichtung der Gesellschaft wurde das Periodikum "Globalgeschichte / Global History" konzipiert, das in der Nachfolge des "Jahrbuchs für Europäische Überseegeschichte" (2001-2022) steht. "Globalgeschichte / Global History" bietet ein Forum für wissenschaftliche Aufsätze, Debattenbeiträge sowie Literaturberichte in deutscher und englischer Sprache, die Aspekte dieses ebenso vielfältigen wie dynamischen Forschungsfelds beleuchten.From the contents (altogether 11 contributions):Andreas Flurschütz da CruzDagmar Freist & Lucas Haasis, Die Prize Papers. Produkt und Zeugnis von globalen Konfrontationen, Kolonialismus und Verflechtungen in der Frühen Neuzeit (1652-1815)Corinna Gramatke, Indigene Aneignungen und wirtschaftliche Autonomie. Zur Materialität des religiösen Kulturtransfers in der Jesuitenmission im frühneuzeitlichen ParaguayChristoph Marx, Heinrich Barths ForschungsmethodeSarah Benneh-Oberschewen, Heinrich Barth - Wegbereiter einer antirassistischen Wahrnehmung westafrikanischer StädteStephanie Zehnle, What Makes an African State? Barth's Inter-Cultural Approaches

Für die Kulturpolitiker der Ostblockstaaten war Musik in herrschaftspolitischer Hinsicht viel zu bedeutend, als dass sie die Entwicklungen auf diesem Gebiet dem Zufall überlassen wollten. Die Beiträge des von Rüdiger Ritter herausgegebenen Bandes fragen daher nach den gesellschaftlichen Auswirkungen musikalischer Dynamiken. Bekannte Beschreibungsmuster, wie etwa von Musik als Ausdruck eines Freiheitswillens, werden auf den Prüfstand gestellt und mit entsprechenden Entwicklungen beispielsweise in Westeuropa oder in den USA parallelisiert. Schließlich geht es um die Frage, ob und wie die staatssozialistischen Vergangenheiten die Bedeutung der Musik für gesellschaftliche Prozesse auch im Postsozialismus, d.¿h. seit 1989/91 und bis heute, bestimmten.Die Beiträge dokumentieren eine internationale Konferenz, die im Jahr 2019 am Johann-Gottfried-Herder-Institut in Marburg stattfand.

Since the beginning of his rise to power, Chinggis Khan used matrimonial relations between the members of his family and his allies in order to strengthen his support base and to expand the potential of his army. Whereas research has discussed in detail the history of the Chinggisid women, the role of their male non-Chinggisid counterparts - the imperial sons-in-law (Mon. güregen, Ch. fuma ¿¿), mostly the powerful military commanders - is still an under-researched topic. In his monograph, Ishayahu Landa for the first time provides a comprehensive and detailed discussion of the Chinggisid in-laws, approaching them as a separate political institution with its own status, privileges, and ambitions, which played a crucial role in underpinning the Mongol rule across the continent. The monograph is unique in its combined usage of Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Latin and Old Slavonic primary sources as well as its temporal scope, ranging from the early thirteenth century to the period of the Chinggisid Crisis and beyond. The monograph will be of interest for specialists in Mongol, Chinese, Islamic, Russian, and global histories, as well as in the field of Gender Studies, and nomadic history and ethnography. At the same time, it covers an important aspect of the power structure behind the Chinggisid expansion, its maintenance of power from Korea to the Black Sea, as well as its decline.

The Late Middle Kingdom and the Second Intermediate Period were the heyday for scarab seals with names in Ancient Egypt. During this time, names of kings and non-royal individuals occur on hundreds of scarabs and their impressions making scarabs one of the primary groups of written sources for the period. This book explores research paths opened by confronting the textual evidence provided by scarabs with the stylistic and typological traits observable on them in an effort to recontextualize these miniature decorative objects, most of which stem from mass-scale undocumented plundering in the late 19th and early 20th century.The book takes a new perspective on scarab production in Egypt showing that different types of scarabs were produced concurrently, and the production of scarabs was not limited to a single centre at a given period. It amends the methodology of studying Middle Bronze Age scarabs in Egypt to acknowledge that artisans purposefully reproduced certain scarab styles. The study contributes to the ongoing discussions on the chronology of the Second Intermediate Period, Egypt's interconnections with the Levant and the role of foreigners in Egypt in the Middle Kingdom.

Das Wörterbuch enthält ca. 10.000 Lexeme und umfasst den gebräuchlichsten Wortschatz des Tigrinischen, der Nationalsprache Eritreas und einer der Arbeitssprachen Äthiopiens. Es beinhaltet Beispiele aus Originalquellen mit deutscher und englischer Übersetzung, darunter Wortverbindungen, Redewendungen, Sprichwörter und Rätsel. Ca. 400 der aufgeführten Wörter kommen in keinem der bisher erschienenen Wörterbücher dieser semitischen Sprache vor. Am Ende sind geografische Namen und gängige Abkürzungen verzeichnet. Es ist ein Häufigkeitswörterbuch, welches neben dem allgemeinen Wortschatz verschiedene Gebiete des modernen Sprachgebrauchs umfasst, darunter Fachbegriffe, Dialekt- und Tabuwörter. Ebenfalls enthalten sind zahlreiche wort- und formbildende Sprachsilben sowie grammatische Konstruktionen mit anschaulichen Erklärungen. Dank der komplexen Struktur der Einträge unterscheidet sich das Wörterbuch vorteilhaft von den bisher bekannten Gegenstücken. Es richtet sich an Sprecherinnen und Sprecher aller drei Sprachen und eignet sich zum Lesen und Übersetzen von Texten bis zu einem mittleren Schwierigkeitsgrad. Es wird für diejenigen von Nutzen sein, die die jeweilige Sprache lernen oder lehren, sich mit Tigrinistik, Semitistik, Typologie, Übersetzungs- und vergleichenden Sprachwissenschaften beschäftigen oder tigrinische Literatur im Original lesen.

The book offers a new perspective on the emergence and spread of Indo-Aryan in North India. Based on the analysis of more than 200 Indo-Aryan languages and dialects, it proves that there was more than just one immigration of Indo-Aryan speakers to North India. This left clear marks on the modern Indo-Aryan languages. When the Vedic-speaking Indo-Aryans arrived in northern India, there were already speakers of other Indo-Aryan dialects that were slightly more archaic than Vedic. Traces of these somewhat more archaic dialects are mainly found in peripheral Indo-Aryan languages between the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush. They are therefore called outer languages, while the descendants of Vedic and Classical Sanskrit (e.g. Pali and Hindi) are called inner languages. Outer and inner languages differ not only in terms of archaicity, but they have also developed differently, especially in phonology. The book also addresses the question of the linguistic situation in North India before the arrival of the first Indo-Aryans. Again, it is these peripheral languages, albeit along with many small Tibeto-Burmese Himalayan languages, that have preserved the richest linguistic data showing that prehistoric North India was dominated by Austro-Asiatic languages before the arrival of the Indo-Aryans.

This dictionary aims to cover the whole lexicon of Tocharian A, one of the two Tocharian languages, which form a distinct branch in the Indo-European language family. These languages are documented in manuscripts found mostly in Buddhist monasteries located in the oases of the Tarim Basin, in Xinjiang, China, and dated in the second half of the 1st millennium CE. The dictionary contains a thesaurus based on all the identified texts in Tocharian A, published as well as unpublished, which are kept in various collections. It covers much more data than the dictionary published by Pavel Poucha in 1955, which was based on the Tocharian A manuscripts from the so-called Turfan collection (Berlin), edited by Emil Sieg and Wilhelm Siegling in 1921. The book includes a thorough revision of the Dictionary and Thesaurus of Tocharian A. Volume 1 (2009), which covered only the beginning of the lexicon (letters A to J). All forms of words, including variants, occurring in the texts are listed separately with reference to the occurrences and a sample of passages in transcription and translation. The meaning of a number of words has been better defined and corrected against previous glossaries. When possible, the lemmas include the corresponding items attested in Tocharian B. The references given for each lemma aim to retrieve the previous secondary literature. Many lemmas contain philological contributions pertaining to the interpretation of critical passages. Much focus has been laid on phraseology and literary parallels with other Buddhist texts from Central Asia. The sources of loanwords, from Tocharian B, Old and Middle Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Old Turkic, and Chinese, are given as much as they can be traced.

The House of the Two Skeletons is located in a quarter at the western border of the Hellenistic city of Morgantina in Sicily. It was partially investigated in 1971 and 2004/05, and fully excavated from 2014 to 2016. Built around 250 BC as a simple and modestly decorated courtyard house, it occupied a squarish lot with a surface area of 389 m2 and included 20 rooms. During its use for some 50-60 years, the house was remodeled four times. The building was split into two separate courtyard houses in Phase 3 before 211 BC, when the Romans conquered Morgantina. At the end of this phase, two adult women were buried in two separate corner rooms of the house, and their skeletons gave this house its modern name. The women were most likely buried in haste during the tumultuous years that preceded the final conquest of the city, sometime between 214 and 211 BC. After 211 BC, the house was briefly and partially used for modest residential purposes and industrial activities that can no longer be specified.This book presents the archaeological evidence of the House of the Two Skeletons in a contextualized and comprehensive manner. All rooms are described and assessed one after another, including the architecture, the stratigraphy, and the finds, followed by an interpretation that outlines the phasing scheme and possible function of a room. Thematic discussions are dedicated to significant features, such as the construction materials and techniques, the water management, kitchens, platforms, evidence of domestic cult, metal finds and coins, and the skeletons. Finally, a concluding narrative outlines the development and function of the House of the Two Skeletons and assesses it in the local urban and regional Sicilian context.

In 1977-78, right after Papua New Guinea had achieved its political independence, Derk van Groningen was living among the Kilenge people on the north-west coast of the island of New Britain. Originally, his ethnographic field research centered on the circular migration pattern in the Kilenge area. Being permitted to take photographs of their daily activities, his focus became much broader. Groningen's work presents a photographic documentation of many aspects of Kilenge life during the transition period from colonial rule to self-determination and governance. His original observations and photographs are published here for the first time.

City of Modernity consists of 33 essays about Lódz, a city that started out as an agricultural settlement and became a metropolis within a single generation, all thanks to technological progress. Its population of 767 in 1820, it had grown to 767,000 by 1939. At the turn of the century, it emblematized modernization and industrialization, and was a symbol of industrial-era modernity. It was often compared to Manchester and its truly American pace of development was admired. The city's rapid economic career was impressive, but it also exacted a high social cost. The authors, representing a variety of fields (history, sociology, literary, theatre and film studies, cultural anthropology) analyze many aspects of Lódz's economic, social and cultural life before the outbreak of World War II. In reference to Lódz modernism, they explore notions like modernity, metropolitanism and peripherality, multi-culturalism and multi-ethnicity (Lódz was a labor destination for German settlers, Polish peasants, Jews, as well as newcomers from the Russian interior), the phenomenon of workers' movements which peaked during the revolution of 1905, and the expansion of mass entertainment. The publication also looks at issues linked to urban infrastructure, animators of cultural life, and the emergence of new religious, political, and emancipation movements.

Geevarghese Mar Osthathios (1918-2012) was a South Indian Orthodox theologian whose theological reflections are a unique combination of Protestant principles and Orthodox ethos. His life and work contextually occupy a significant place in the development of the Malankara Orthodox Syriac Church. In addition, his preoccupation with missionary work in Indian conditions has been intertwined with ecumenical currents of the second half of the 20th century.The central expression of his theology lies in the Trinity as for him Trinity has relational implications on socio­-political level, its relevance and the applicability as a critique of societal systems of governing. Therefore, the book by Ilija Jovic deals with the focal points of his Trinitarian theology, missiological as well as ecumenical perspectives and their social consequences. Moreover, by determining and critically examining Mar Osthathios argumentation that structuring of society should be based on the model of the Trinity, Jovic's study takes precedent in giving concern to social challenges within the Oriental Orthodox Theology.

This volume is a collection of papers that have been given at an international conference in December 2019 in Bregenz, Austria. They focus on Arrian of Nicomedia's Anabasis Alexandrou which is our main source for the life and reign of Alexander the Great. So far, scholarship has paid only little attention to the Anabasis as literary cosmos of its own right. The various contributions critically evaluate the still extant general opinion, that Arrian deserves a distinguished status as the main source on the Macedonian conqueror since he allegedly closely followed his sources. But the first accounts of the participants in Alexander's famous expedition have only survived as fragments and thus their literary production is more or less shrouded in mystery. Hence, the tension between Arrian's literary creativity, propinquity to his sources, his relationship to his role-model Xenophon merits serious examination when assessing the value of his work as a historical source. The volume is the first attempt to contextualize the work of Arrian against various backdrops. This includes the reign of Alexander, the Classical and contemporary literary trends, the Second Sophistic as intellectual framework, the until yet neglected idea of "empire" as well as echoes and stimuli from the Achaemenid and Hellenistic period. The various contributions create a more complex image of Arrian as an author, his literary production and his idea of the Macedonian conqueror that helps us to gain a better understanding of this complex text and Alexander the Great as its protagonist.

What do we mean by Jewish space? How does it come into being, what qualities does it possess, and how does one experience it? Does this specific space play a role in Jewish-Christian encounters? How are shared Jewish-Christian spaces created in small towns often understood as shtetls? The volume Space as a Category for the Research of the History of Jews in Poland-Lithuania 1500-1900 answers those questions using examples from early modern Poland-Lithuanian and its successor states. Eight different authors examine various issues that were substantial for the Jewish experience in the most significant Jewish community in the world. The range of contributions includes the authors' multiple methodological approaches in their research, both historical and sociological, and architectural practices. The compilation of the articles also breaks chronological boundaries by presenting texts from the early modern era and the early 19th century. Examples from medieval Jewish Cracow and early modern small towns in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Warsaw, Gdansk/Danzig, and Berlin analyzed in this volume are shedding new light on the Jewish experience in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its successor states. The book is exciting for anyone interested in Jewish history and Jewish-Christian relations.

The book contains first editions of thirty-three cuneiform tablets from the Frau Professor Hilprecht Collection, dating to the second half of the second millennium and the first millennium BCE, as well as duplicates and parallels from other museums. The majority of the edited tablets stem from the city of Nippur, but the book also includes manuscripts from Assur and Babylon. The tablets comprise literary, magic, and divinatory texts, as well as fifteen Middle and Neo-Babylonian school manuscripts with excerpts from various compositions. The literary texts include a large prayer invoking blessings of Nippur gods upon the king, known in other cities as well; a wisdom monologue, and a manuscript of The Exaltation of IStar. The magic section includes Middle Babylonian versions of anti-witchcraft incantations previously known in the first millennium, as well as exorcistic spells, and formulas to be recited upon the consecration of Nippur priests. Extispicy, hemerologies, and physiognomy are among the divinatory texts edited. The school tablets contain excerpts from several texts previously unknown to have survived into the respective periods, such as a Middle Babylonian version of Tamarisk and Palm and a first-millennium version of the wisdom text Hearken to the Advice.The introduction of the book contains an overview of Nippur history, as well as a discussion of the provenance of the tablets and their social and school contexts. The city of Nippur, whose scholarly production circulated widely in Antiquity, is strangely bereft of scholarly manuscripts, a fact that the book seeks to explain.

Central Asia is a vast region separating and at the same time connecting the civilizations of the Near East, East Asia and the Indian subcontinent with each other and with the neighboring nomadic cultures. This richly illustrated book reflects the contributions of a conference that took place in Bern in 2020 and includes 32 contributions from 56 authors from 18 countries. The conference evaluated the supra-, inter-, and intraregional modes of cultural exchange and knowledge transfer like trade, migration, missionary activities or military encounters. This exchange occurred within Central Asia, from the outside into Central Asia or conversely out of Central Asia to neighboring cultures. The timeframe considered was from the Early Bronze Age to the period of Amir Timur (end of the 14th century CE) and the geographic scope stretched from the eastern Caucasus in the west till Xinjiang in the east and from southern Siberia in the north till Baluchistan in the south. All papers presented were based upon new archaeological investigations, surveys and discoveries. Most of the contributions suggest that in Central Asia, based on its specific geopolitical location, typical "contact cultures" blossomed which were influenced to varying degrees by the neighboring cultures and thus produced many facets of cultural hybridisation.The conclusions of many of the excavations presented here will be published in English for the first time. Each article is accompanied by an extensive bibliography and a Russian abstract.

Hinter dem Schlagwort ,historisches Litauen' verbirgt sich ein riesiges Forschungsfeld, das faszinierende Perspektiven bereithält - nicht nur für Geschichtswissenschaft und Baltistik, sondern auch und gerade für die Slavistik.Im Großfürstentum Litauen fanden im Mittelalter litauische und ostslawische Elemente zu einer Synthese. Das Vielvölkerreich stieg zusammen mit dem Königreich Polen auf zur europäischen Großmacht, bevor beide am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts geteilt wurden. Im 19. Jahrhundert kanalisierte sich Widerstand gegen die russische Fremdherrschaft in zwei politischen Projekten, die auch das literarische Leben entscheidend prägten. Der Wunsch nach einer Restitution der polnisch-litauischen Rzeczpospolita und das Festhalten an der polnischsprachigen Leitkultur konkurrierten mit dem Streben einzelner Kollektive nach kultureller Identität und politischer Emanzipation. Heute steht der Erinnerungsort ,historisches Litauen' für eine gemeinsame europäische Vergangenheit, die vor dem Hintergrund der niedergeschlagenen belarusischen Revolution und dem russischen Angriff auf die Ukraine Solidarität stiftet.Die lange Zeit von kommunistischer Zensur und nationalen Narrativen geprägte Forschungslandschaft hat in den letzten Jahren begonnen, die vielfältigen litauisch-belarusisch-polnisch-ukrainischen Verflechtungen wiederzuentdecken und ihre Bedeutung neu zu diskutieren.

This volume contains contributions from three conferences held within the framework of the project "Law between Dialogue and Translation (The Example of Palestine)", funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). The conferences were hosted by the project partners from the Department for Arabic and Islamic Studies of the University of Göttingen (Germany) and the Faculty of Law from Al-Quds University (Palestine) in 2019 and 2020, and the School of Graduate Studies of the State Islamic University Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta (Indonesia) in 2021. The project aimed to analyze how international law and human rights norms are implemented or "translated" into national legislation, with a special focus on the role of Islamic law and institutions in these processes. The volume provides a theoretical introduction on the concepts of "translation" of law and of "legal pluralism" and continues to discuss four main areas in which different practical aspects of these concepts can be observed: 1) the dealing of German and Palestinian judicial institutions with the relation between state, religion and rights of the individual, 2) achievements and challenges of women's rights implementation in Indonesia, 3) the entanglement of Sharia, Customary and State law in Palestine, and 4) recent developments in international criminal and humanitarian law in the Palestinian context.

Thorough investigations in recent decades have brought to light a relatively large number of ancient manuscripts of the various books of the Old and New Testaments from different parts of Ethiopia. This has led to a renewed interest in up-to-date critical editions of all the books of the Ethiopic Bible. For the Book of Jeremiah, however, there has never been a critical edition. This collection of seven essays marks the beginning of a new endeavour to fill this gap. Stefan Weninger introduces the reader medias in res, providing a condensed overview of the history of Ethiopic Jeremiah scholarship. Martin Heide's essay is a sample edition of the Book of Jeremiah based on nearly sixty manuscripts. The data that became available through collation allow to classify the manuscripts and provide first insights into the textual history of the Jeremiah Cycle. Michael Knibb invites the reader to review his experience with the critical edition of the Book of Ezekiel. Furthermore, another essay by him deals with the very intriguing manuscript Leiden Or. 14.692, being probably the earliest Ethiopic manuscript of Ezekiel. Steve Delamarter and Garry Jost introduce the reader to the digital methodology of the Textual History of the Ethiopic Old Testament project, which they apply to a sample chapter of Jeremiah, coming to a similar conclusion - from a different perspective - as Martin Heide. Alessandro Bausi addresses important methodological questions, that is, the status of a reconstruction or whether critical editions of Ethiopic texts should be written in normalized orthography. Finally, Siegfried Kreuzer introduces the reader to an up-to-date view of the textual history of the Septuagint. This enables (and challenges) scholars dealing with textual criticism of Ethiopic Old Testament books to carefully consider the question of the Greek Vorlage.

This volume introduces latest research on the necropolis of ancient Asyut and a broad spectrum of different topics. It opens with a deep insight in the long history of the ancient town of Asyut and its different functions throughout history, followed by a contribution highlighting the connections between the city and the oases of Kharga and Dakhla via the Darb el Arba'in, the ancient caravan route through the Western Desert. Research on the temple of Wepwawet, chief deitiy of Asyut, closes the section on the ancient town itself. Turning to the necropolis on Gebel Asyut al-gharbi, an as yet unpublished tomb of a high official of the late 11th/early 12th Dynasty is presented, followed by contributions on material culture including an in-depth analysis of a statue head found during recent fieldwork, an iconographical study on the depiction of wedjat-eyes on Asyuti coffins of the First Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom; the detailed analysis of a hitherto unpublished coffin and a study on the "Book of the Two Ways" inscribed on another coffin from Asyut. Objects discussed include wooden models and their correlation with wall decoration, latest finds of pottery offering trays and first results of the examination of Asyuti stone offering tables. New Kingdom and Late Period finds are discussed in an article with new information on ushebtis from the collections of Sayed Bey Khashaba and the Museo Gregoriano in Città del Vaticano, and in a typological analysis of faience chalices with a focus on recent finds of The Asyut Project. The volume closes with a hitherto unpublished copy of spell 72 of the Book of the Dead that is inscribed on the early Ptolemaic mummy cartonnage of Padiamun found during fieldwork and an article that details Christian tomb stelae and the special local Asyuti formulae used for inscribing them.

This book is the result of a workshop organized by the editors on April 5, 2018, during the 11th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (ICAANE) in Munich, Germany.The workshop's goal was to discuss the archaeological traces, or lack thereof, of the so-called transitional periods in the long history of Northern Mesopotamia, from the Bronze Age to the Islamic period. What emerges from the contributions, which differ in terms of chronology, spatial extent, and research subject - from single sites to long term investigation, from material culture to historical approaches -, goes beyond the traditional approach to the Dark Ages, emphasizing phenomena of resilience and evolution, rather than drastic and abrupt changes. From the expansion and contraction of settlement patterns to the spatial redefinition of urban spaces and the persistence of certain ceramic horizons through time, the authors put back the material evidence on the agenda of the archaeological research on the Dark Ages. The book offers a unique view, although from different angles, of some of the in-between periods of Mesopotamian history: The Middle-Late Bronze transition, the so-called post-Assyrian period, the evolution of late antiquity material culture into the Islamic period. Thus, the authors aim at redefining the concept of transition in the light of new or revised data from fundamental projects in Syria, Iraq, and Iraqi Kurdistan.