Table of Contents for Near Eastern Archaeology 88.4 (December 2025)
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Recent rescue excavations at the Deh Dumen cemetery near the Khersan III Dam in the southern Zagros identified 20 graves. This study, based on the first excavation season, sheds light on burial practices and cultural connections of local people in the Bronze Age. Likely within Elamite territory, the cemetery includes stone and jar graves for different social groups. The excavations yielded nearly 145 artifacts, including pottery, metal, and stones. The presence of imported items, such as lapis lazuli from Central Asia and metal artifacts from the Indus Valley, indicates extensive trade relations and cultural contacts with southeastern and northeastern Iran. These findings suggest that the Zagros region had access to a trade route connecting East and West and maintained strong connections with other Elamite communities during the Bronze Age. PLEASE NOTE: This article contains images of human skeletal remains.
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This article focuses on the analysis of settlement building and abandonment activities and their impact on the formation of community ideologies and ideas. Specifically, the evidence of social practices will be discussed for Prehistoric Cyprus, taking the example of the Middle Bronze Age community at Erimi in South coastal Cyprus. Through the discussion of specific evidence recovered from the workshop complex and domestic areas at this site, we aim to explore the possible connection of construction and abandonment activities with ritualized practices performed by the community to ensure and sustain long-term social cohesion and construct social memory and communal identity.
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This article examines a newly discovered rock-cut tomb in Āb Bād village, Qir-o Karzin county, Iran. The tomb features a simple design with a single chamber and a burial cavity, or cist. Its facade is constructed with three overlapping rectangular registers in a stepped arrangement, devoid of decoration or relief. This reflects architectural continuity from Achaemenid rock tombs (550–330 BCE). Based on current survey evidence, it is highly probable that the construction of this tomb dates to the post-Achaemenid period (330 BCE–224 CE) and likely belonged to a high-ranking local ruler or noble of Pars under the Parthian Empire.
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The emergence of sedentary societies in southeastern Anatolia has been the focus of numerous studies in recent years, particularly those concentrating on Early Neolithic mound settlements located along the riverbanks of the Euphrates Basin and the Tigris Valley. However, research on the Late Epipaleolithic communities in this region remains limited. Currently, our knowledge of the early phase of the transition to sedentary lifestyle in southeastern Anatolia is based on information gathered from only five archaeological sites, most of which are situated along the Tigris: Körtik Tepe, Çemka Höyük, Boncuklu Tarla, Biris Mezarlığı, and Söğüt Tarlası. Recently, the excavation of Ulukoy Cave in 2023 and 2024, located in the Mardin Range, led to the discovery of Epipaleolithic architectural features and lithic tools in its terrace. This article presents our initial observations from this archaeological site.
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The Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites in Jordan represent important stages in the evolution of human social structures in the Middle East. These sites reveal a remarkably complex social differentiation, as well as cultural and technological advances that paved the way for stratified socioeconomic structures in the Transjordanian Highlands. One important Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic site is Baʿja (ca. 7200–6800 BCE). Dr. Hans K. Gebel and his team from the Free University of Berlin first excavated Baʿja in 1984. Excavations resumed in 1997 and continue today. This article examines a particular bone tool: a very thin, cylindrical eyed needle, recovered in the lowermost layer of Baʿja stratigraphy. The object is notable for its dimensional smallness. In order to gather more information about its possible production technique and use, the researchers conducted a scientific experiment to produce a replica similar to the original Baʿja eyed needle.
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Within about a century of the earliest inventions of writing in southern Iraq and Egypt at the end of the fourth millennium BCE, a third writing system was invented in southwestern Iran. This writing is called proto-Elamite, and it has remained undeciphered, even though a large number of tablets (now over 1,700) have been available for study since the early twentieth century. The name proto-Elamite is a conventional label, not meant to imply a known language, that was coined by V. Scheil. Proto- Elamite is a distinct corpus from the much later Linear Elamite writing system. With increasing digital documentation of this corpus, new avenues of research have opened, and over the past five years an interdisciplinary team of researchers has been making insights by combining traditional knowledge of the corpus with techniques developed in computational linguistics.
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The Shogha-Taimuran period refers to the second half of the second millennium BCE in the Kur River Basin of southwestern Iran, characterized by two visually distinct yet contemporaneous pottery types. To elucidate the causes of these distinctions, Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) and X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) were conducted on the samples. Previous researchers posited Tol-e Darwazeh as the production center for Shogha-Taimuran pottery. However, this study reveals that Tol-e Taimuran also served as a production center, indicating different origins for some Taimuran pottery types and reflecting two distinct pottery traditions in the mid-second millennium BCE (Middle Elam). Analyses of Taimuran pottery, alongside other site findings, indicate connections with other areas, positioning Tol-e Taimuran as a potential main center for Shogha-Taimuran culture following the abandonment of Tol-e Malyan.
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We all remember a time when the History Channel was about history, documentaries bored us with facts and black-and-white footage, and everyone knew Indiana Jones, Daniel Jackson, and River Song were swashbuckling adventurers (not serious scientists). When did the lines between fiction and fact blur? Did it start when thorough public history education was reduced to merely one year during middle school, when the Socratic method gave way to teaching-to-the-test? Although many of us are still fascinated by our ancestors and the empires they built and destroyed, the field of archaeology is shrinking when we need more access to the lessons of the past, not less.
Both researchers and readers must understand the problem before us: troll farms are creating and multiplying fake content that crowd out real news, profit-trained algorithms are pushing what we learn, and AI is making falsehood harder to detect.
Amanda Hope Haley has a bachelor of arts in Religious Studies from Rhodes College and a master of theological studies in Hebrew Scripture and Interpretation from Harvard University. She entered the publishing industry in 2005, first contributing to The Voice Bible as a translator, commentary writer, and editor. She then began working with popular nonfiction titles as a content editor, theological reviewer, and ghostwriter before her first book was published by Thomas Nelson in 2014. Amanda’s most recent book, Stones Still Speak: How Biblical Archaeology Illuminates the Stories You Thought You Knew, was released by Revell in September and encourages readers to distinguish between popular traditions and historical facts. Between writing manuscripts, she podcasts as The Red-Haired Archaeologist® and introduces sound archaeological insights to readers overwhelmed and misdirected by cinematic or culturally inherited images of the ancient world.

















What is a god? While the question is simple enough, our answer often depends on our cultural context, and we tend to expect other cultures to have the same ideas we do. We also project our modern ideas backward onto ancient texts, overlooking native classifications in the process. However, rather than being a fixed category, the definition of a “god” is culturally conditioned. With an assist from the Cognitive Science of Religion, this presentation attempts to reconstruct ancient perceptions of gods in the Ancient Near East and the Bible. It draws from and expands upon Dr. Hundley’s
We begin by surveying the various beings who may qualify as gods in the Bible and the wider Ancient Near East, including Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Hittite Anatolia. With the data in place, we consider the qualities that all deities share. While gods come in all shapes and sizes, all possess power and agency. To make the divine world more comprehensible, we then sort the divine sphere into categories: high gods (e.g., Egyptian Amun, Mesopotamian Marduk and Assur, Ugaritic El, and biblical YHWH), major gods, minor gods, and peripheral gods. High gods rule, and in the case of Amun, Marduk, Assur, and YHWH, possess a complement of divine powers, like a one-stop shop. Major gods often are specialists (e.g., weather, sun, moon), whereas minor gods serve the high and major gods. Peripheral gods include deified natural phenomena like rivers and mountains, monsters and demons, foreign gods, as well as seemingly inanimate objects like beds and doorposts. Although all gods possess humanlike agency, those closer to the top tend to be the most humanlike internally, making them immediately more understandable and relatable. By contrast, peripheral gods tend to be less humanlike and, as such, more menacing.
Dr. Michael Hundley (B.A. Amherst College; Ph.D. University of Cambridge) is Assistant Professor of Teaching at the University of Memphis. He works at the intersection of human and divine in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and the Ancient Near East and has published multiple books and articles, including Keeping Heaven on Earth: Safeguarding the Divine Presence in the Priestly Tabernacle (2011), Gods in Dwellings: Temples and Divine Presence in the Ancient Near East (2013), and Yahweh among the Gods: The Divine in Genesis, Exodus, and the Ancient Near East (2022). He is currently finishing Ancient Gods and Monsters: The Bible, the Ancient Near East, and Beyond and is beginning Temples and Divine Presence in the Bible and Ancient Near East for the Cambridge Elements series. Future projects include a comparison of temples and divine presence in the Bible, Ancient Near East, and Hinduism and an exploration of gendering gods.

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