Archaeology Odyssey

See Richard A. Parker’s and Otto Neugebauer’s Egyptian Astronomical Texts, 3 volumes (Providence, 1960-1969) and Marshall Clagett’s Ancient Egyptian Science, II: Calendars, Clocks, and Astronomy (Philadelphia, 1995).

Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossumtells the clock’s history in greatdetail in his History of the Hour (University of Chicago Press, 1996). Another useful survey is Carlo Cipolla’s Clocks and Culture, 1300-1700 (W.W. Norton, 1977).

The exhibition was held from October 21, 2004, to January 17, 2005, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the start of the French excavations at Ras Shamra.

Biblical Elishah, one of the descendants of Javan (see Genesis 10:4), may also have some connection with Alashiya, but another of Javan’s descendants, Kittim, is identified with the Cypriot city of Kition (modern Larnaca) and hence Cyprus. In any case, the dating of these references, not to mention their historicity, is too uncertain to make their evidence reliable.

In ancient times, the wedge-shaped cuneiform script was used to record several languages, including Akkadian, a Semitic language spoken by the Babylonians and Assyrians and employed as a diplomatic lingua franca throughout the Near East.

Archaeology Odyssey 08:01.

Mitchell chooses to omit Tablet 12, in which Gilgamesh is deified as a god of the underworld, and end the tale with Tablet 11, in which Gilgamesh returns to Uruk. Although this is a somewhat arbitrary decision, it does leave the question of mortality ambiguous—making Mitchell’s version of Gilgamesh a “this worldly” rather than an “other-worldly” quest narrative.

A superb scholarly edition was recently published by Andrew R. George: The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts, 2 vols. (Oxford University Press, 2003). David Ferry’s Gilgamesh (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992) is a very good popular translation.

The margin of error of dates obtained from Sothic dating is roughly 10 to 20 years for the second half of the second millennium B.C., 40 to 50 years for the first half of the second millennium B.C., and one to two centuries for the third millennium B.C.