The Lost World of Elam


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When God Was A Woman


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Here, archaeologically documented,is the story of the religion of the Goddess. Under her, women’s roles were far more prominent than in patriarchal Judeo-Christian cultures. Stone describes this ancient system and, with its disintegration, the decline in women’s status.




The Elamite World


Book Description

Amongst the civilizations to participate in the dynamic processes of contact and interchange that gave rise to complex societies in the ancient Near East, Elam has remained one of the most obscure, at times languishing in the background of scholarly inquiry. In recent years, however, an increasing body of academic publications have acknowledged its relevance and suggested that its legacy was more considerable and long-lasting than previously estimated. The Elamite World assembles a group of 40 international scholars to contribute their expertise to the production of a solid, lavishly illustrated, English language treatment of Elamite civilization. It covers topics such as its physical setting, historical development, languages and people, material culture, art, science, religion and society, as well as the legacy of Elam in the Persian empire and its presence in the modern world. This comprehensive and ambitious survey seeks for Elam, hardly a household name, a noteworthy place in our shared cultural heritage. It will be both a valuable introductory text for a general audience and a definitive reference source for students and academics.




The Archaeology of Elam


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From the middle of the 3rd millennium BC until the coming of Cyrus the Great, southwestern Iran was referred to in Mesopotamian sources as the land of Elam. A heterogeneous collection of regions, Elam was home to a variety of groups, alternately the object of Mesopotamian aggression, and aggressors themselves; an ethnic group seemingly swallowed up by the vast Achaemenid Persian empire, yet a force strong enough to attack Babylonia in the last centuries BC. The Elamite language is attested as late as the Medieval era, and the name Elam as late as 1300 in the records of the Nestorian church. This book examines the formation and transformation of Elam's many identities through both archaeological and written evidence, and brings to life one of the most important regions of Western Asia, re-evaluates its significance, and places it in the context of the most recent archaeological and historical scholarship.




Elam


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Not Another U.S. History Textbook


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Why on earth would two history nerds use their own free time to write another US history textbook? Well, that, intelligent human, is the right question. This work breaks from the traditional memorization of who, what, when, where, and focuses on why and how. The former is popular in schools due to its efficiency in quantification for testing. You're either right or wrong about remembering facts. But it's so boring that most students turn off their brains once they set foot in the class, and that habit continues well into old age, if not recognized and corrected. Why and how are more subjective, therefore harder to grade. But with their asking, people become re-centered in our collective story, where they belong. Only then can proper context be understood, and criticism and perspective be applied. We believe this approach to be the missing link in our education and understanding of current issues, norms, and discussion points. Hopefully, after reading this work, each reader's critical thinking will activate around all history permanently. That will certainly aid humanity's evolution and communication. Wait, does that mean this book can be categorized as self-help? Argue away!




Elam and Persia


Book Description

The late 7th and 6th centuries B.C. were a period of tremendous upheaval and change in ancient western Asia, marked by the destruction of the Assyrian Empire, the rise and collapse of the Neo-Babylonian state, and the stunning ascent of what was to become the Achaemenid Persian Empire, the largest polity the world had yet seen. Of the major cultural entities involved in these far-reaching events, Elam has long remained the least understood. The essays contained in this book are part of a continuing reassessment of the nature and significance of Elam in the early 1st millennium B.C., with a focus on the relationship between “Elamite” culture of the Neo-Elamite period and the emerging “Persian” culture in southwestern Iran in the 7th and 6th centuries B.C. The conception of this volume goes back to the 2003 meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research that took place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where two sessions were dedicated to the rich cultural heritage of ancient Iran. It was also the first time that Iranian archaeology was represented at ASOR since the Iranian Revolution. This volume contains 14 contributions by leading scholars in the discipline, organized into 3 sections: archaeology, texts, and images (art history). The volume is richly illustrated with more than 200 drawings and photographs.




The Art of Elam CA. 4200–525 BC


Book Description

The Art of Elam ca. 4200-525 BC offers a view of, and a critical reflection on, the art history of one of the world’s first and least-known civilizations, illuminating a significant chapter of our human past. Not unlike a gallery of historical paintings, this comprehensive treatment of the rich heritage of ancient Iran showcases a visual trail of the evolution of human society, with all its leaps and turns, from its origins in the earliest villages of southwest Iran at around 4200 BC to the rise of the Achaemenid Persian empire in ca. 525 BC. Richly illustrated in full colour with 1450 photographs, 190 line drawings, and digital reconstructions of hundreds of artefacts—some of which have never before been published—The Art of Elam goes beyond formal and thematic boundaries to emphasize the religious, political, and social contexts in which art was created and functioned. Such a magisterial study of Elamite art has never been written making The Art of Elam ca. 4200-525 BC a ground-breaking publication essential to all students of ancient art and to our current understanding of the civilizations of the ancient Near East.




The Last of the Khans


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Some times, I ask myself if I have not dreamt this entire incredible love story myself. I then have to open once again my familial photo album to see the jovial Khan smiling back at me with his confident, glittering eyes and the Princess, smiling too, seated in her comfortable armchair and dressed in full Qashqai tribal regalia to make sure that the whole story was not, after all, just one of those extraordinary dreams of mine Iran's backbone is the Zagros mountain chain-a real paradise on Earth that is dominated by lofty peaks and water cascading down all of its steep valleys. It is also populated by millions of oak trees and inhabited by the oldest tribe on Earth: the Bakhtiaris. The tribal name Bakhtiari literally means the "companions of good fortune." And the twentieth-century discovery of crude oil in this paradise seems to confirm the meaning. An elite family, founded by the great Haydar, has ruled the Bakhtiaris for the past four hundred years. Their leaders marched on Tehran in 1909 to save the young, fragile Constitution and reopen the Parliament. Among those in command was Morteza Quli Khan, a rather unique individual with an extraordinary life. The Last of the Khans recounts his, and the ancient tribe's, great heritage.




Urdu/Hindi: An Artificial Divide


Book Description

In a blow against the British Empire, Khan suggests that London artificially divided India's Hindu and Muslim populations by splitting their one language in two, then burying the evidence in obscure scholarly works outside the public view. All language is political -- and so is the boundary between one language and another. The author analyzes the origins of Urdu, one of the earliest known languages, and propounds the iconoclastic views that Hindi came from pre-Aryan Dravidian and Austric-Munda, not from Aryan's Sanskrit (which, like the Indo-European languages, Greek and Latin, etc., are rooted in the Middle East/Mesopotamia, not in Europe). Hindi's script came from the Aramaic system, similar to Greek, and in the 1800s, the British initiated the divisive game of splitting one language in two, Hindi (for the Hindus) and Urdu (for the Muslims). These facts, he says, have been buried and nearly lost in turgid academic works. Khan bolsters his hypothesis with copious technical linguistic examples. This may spark a revolution in linguistic history! Urdu/Hindi: An Artificial Divide integrates the out of Africa linguistic evolution theory with the fossil linguistics of Middle East, and discards the theory that Sanskrit descended from a hypothetical proto-IndoEuropean language and by degeneration created dialects, Urdu/Hindi and others. It shows that several tribes from the Middle East created the hybrid by cumulative evolution. The oldest groups, Austric and Dravidian, starting 8000 B.C. provided the grammar/syntax plus about 60% of vocabulary, S.K.T. added 10% after 1500 B.C. and Arabic/Persian 20-30% after A.D. 800. The book reveals Mesopotamia as the linguistic melting pot of Sumerian, Babylonian, Elamite, Hittite-Hurrian-Mitanni, etc., with a common script and vocabularies shared mutually and passed on to I.E., S.K.T., D.R., Arabic and then to Hindi/Urdu; in fact the author locates oldest evidence of S.K.T. in Syria. The book also exposes the myths of a revealed S.K.T. or Hebrew and the fiction of linguistic races, i.e. Aryan, Semitic, etc. The book supports the one world concept and reveals the potential of Urdu/Hindi to unite all genetic elements, races and regions of the Indo-Pakistan sub-continent. This is important reading not only for those interested to understand the divisive exploitation of languages in British-led India's partition, but for those interested in: - The science and history of origin of Urdu/Hindi (and other languages) - The false claims of linguistic races and creation - History of Languages and Scripts - Language, Mythology and Racism - Ancient History and Fossil Languages - British Rule and India's Partition.