Welcome to The Ancient Near East Today, Vol. III, No. 1 – the first issue of 2015! In this issue, we take you from Iron Age bureaucrats in ancient Judah to selfie-obsessed graffiti writers around the ancient world, with stops in Assyria and Hollywood.

We begin with new evidence from James Hardin and his colleagues for early bureaucracy in Judah. Friedhelm Pedde looks at the travails of the German excavations at Assur. Karen Stern shows how ancient graffiti writers, like modern ones, just wanted to make their mark. Alex Joffe considers Ridley Scott’s new film Exodus: Gods and Kings. In a podcast, the new editors of the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research discuss where the journal is going. And as always, we’re pleased to bring you an assortment of reports by students supported by ASOR scholarships.

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Graffiti—the ‘Selfies’ of the Ancient Near East?

By: Karen B. Stern

Few phenomena embody the current zeitgeist like the ‘selfie.’ Glances through Facebook or Instagram reveal selfies in abundance. Cameras on today’s smart phones, combined with the platform of social media, transform auto-photography into an art form by allowing people to publically project carefully selected images of themselves—posing in front of famed monuments, clustered with friends at public events, or at home, surrounded by friends and family.

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Iron Age Bullae from Officialdom’s Periphery: Khirbet Summeily in Broader Context

By: James W. Hardin, Christopher A. Rollston, and Jeffrey A. Blakely

Khirbet Summeily is located about 22 kilometers east of Gaza and about 4 kilometers west of Tell el-Hesi, on the ancient road connecting Gaza with Hebron. To the east is the heartland of Judah and to the west is the heartland of Philistia. Summeily lies in the borderland, a small site only slightly larger than one acre.

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Recovering Assur From the German Excavations of 1903-1914 to today’s Assur Project in Berlin

By: Friedhelm Pedde

Exactly one hundred years ago, in 1914, the German excavation in Assur in Northern Iraq ended. Despite this, German research on Assur was only beginning. Assur, the great Assyrian capital, was only one of more than a dozen sites in the Near East in which the Germans had begun archaeological activities.

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“In a world where slaves make bricks without straw…”

By: Alex Joffe

Director Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings is the latest retelling of the Old Testament’s most popular film franchise. Does he succeed or fail? Should Biblical films be Biblical or “historical”? And is Batman a good Moses?

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The Ancient Near East Today features contributions from diverse academics, a forum featuring debates of current developments from the field, and links to news and resources. The ANE Today covers the entire Near East, and each issue presents discussions ranging from the state of biblical archaeology to archaeology after the Arab Spring.

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