June 2022
Vol. 10, No. 6
A New Money Economy at the Dawn of the Iron Age
By Elon Heymans
The idea of precious metals having relative values and being convertible into goods and services goes back to the third millennium. But how did this turn into the concept of money? Chopped up jewelry points the way. Read More
Everyday Life in Exile: Judean Deportees in Babylonian Texts
By Tero Alstola
When King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon conquered the kingdom of Judah, part of Judean population was deported to Babylonia. The Hebrew Bible offers little information about exilic life, but a growing number of Babylonian cuneiform texts shed light on this question.Read More
Rapid Change of Climate Did Not Cause the Fall of the Akkadian Empire
By Arkadiusz Sołtysiak
Scholars have claimed that the Akkadian Empire of the third millennium BCE collapsed due to rapid climate change but decades of research have failed to produce real evidence. In fact, a new study of human bones suggests stability. Read More
Portraits of People and Society From Palmyra
By Maura Heyn
Thousands of individual funerary portraits from the city of Palmyra, in the eastern Roman Empire date to the first three centuries CE. What do these detailed and personal sculptures tell us about men, women, families, and society? Read More
Who’s Afraid of the Goddess of Ancient Israel?
By Dvora Lederman Daniely
Many scholars believe that Asherah was the consort of the Israelite god Yahweh. The Biblical texts speak disapprovingly of Asherah worship in the temple itself, but was the goddess encoded elsewhere in the texts? Read More
