Archaeology Odyssey

For a full survey of the issue, see Merrillees, Alashia Revisited, Cahiers de la Revue Biblique, No. 22 (Paris: J. Gabalda et Cie., 1987).

M.C. Astour, “New Evidence on the Last Days of Ugarit” in American Journal of Archaeology 69 (1965), p. 255. A recent translation of the letter appears in Near Eastern and Aegean Texts from the Third to the First Millennia B.C., A. Bernard Knapp ed., vol. 2 of Sources for the History of Cyprus, P.W. Wallace and A.G. Orphanides, eds. (Altamont, NY: Greece and Cyprus Research Center, 1996), p. 27, Text 28. Gary Beckman, who did the translation, employs the term “Alashiya” throughout.

Robert S. Merrillees, “What’s in a name? Henna and the name of Cyprus” in Holy Land. Illustrated Quarterly of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land 6.4 (Winter 1986), pp. 216–218.

I am grateful to Reuven Amitai for this description of the third phase. See Reuven Amitai, “An Arabic Inscription at al-Subayba (Qal‘at Nimrod) from the Reign of Sultan Baybars,” in Moshe Hartal, The al-Subayba (Nimrod) Fortress, Towers 11 and 9, Israel Antiquities Authority Reports, no. 11 (Jerusalem, 2001), pp. 109–124.

Kitchener, Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statements (1877), p. 173.

In these lists, each year is named after an official called the limu, whose main function was to lend his name to the year (eponymously). The Assyrian year-lists are not king lists, though sometimes kings act as the limu. These lists are collected in Alan Millard, The Eponyms of the Assyrian Empire, 910–612 BC (Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 1994).

These texts can be found in Bezalel Porten and Ada Yardeni, Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Academon, 1986–1993).

Only recently, however, have the Diaries become easily accessible, because of publications by Abraham Sachs and Hermann Hunger; the first three volumes of their Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from Babylonia, containing most of the Diaries, appeared in 1988, 1989 and 1996.

The decipherment of Babylonian astronomy began at the end of the 19th century. A milestone is Franz Xaver Kugler’s book on lunar motion according to the Babylonians (Die Babylonische Mondrechnung [1900]). With such studies as Astronomical Cuneiform Texts (1955) and History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy (1975), Otto Neugebauer of Brown University played an important role in this development.

Hippocrates, On the Sacred Disease.