Mathieu Ossendrijver, one of ISAW's visiting research scholars in 2010-11, has published a new book entitled Babylonian Mathematical Astronomy: Procedure Texts, part of the Sources and Studies in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences series from Springer. The book contains a new analysis of the procedure texts of Babylonian mathematical astronomy. These cuneiform tablets, excavated in Babylon and Uruk and dating from 350-50 BCE, contain computational instructions that represent the earliest known form of mathematical astronomy of the ancient world. The book includes new translations of all 108 available tablets accompanied by commentaries and color photographs of the tablets. The preceding chapters are devoted to documentary, lexical, semantic, mathematical and astronomical aspects of the procedure texts. Special attention is given to issues of  mathematical representation, a topic that had previously been largely ignored. Mathematical concepts are presented in a didactic fashion, setting out from the most elementary ones (numbers and elementary operations) to more complex ones (algorithms and computational systems). Chapters devoted to the planets and the Moon contain updated and expanded reconstructions and astronomical interpretations of the algorithms.

From: http://www.springer.com/mathematics/history+of+mathematics/book/978-1-4614-3781-9

Melik Kaylan writes in the Wall Street Journal for 1 May 2012 concerning ISAW's Nomads and Networks exhibition, as follows:

As the world shrinks, one is increasingly grateful for glimpses of cultures, farflung in time or place, that stir up one's inner Tintin or Conan Doyle with a sense of irreducible mystery. The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) seems dedicated to bringing us just such glimpses—in the most scholarly way, of course, it being a branch of New York University. The Institute's whimsically old-world setting accentuates the feeling of discovery.

You walk into a repurposed townhouse—externally discreet, internally grand—just off upper Fifth Avenue and find a wholly unimaginable experience, an encounter, say, with 3000 B.C. Nubia or with Danube Valley relics from 5000 B.C. (two shows from recent years). The current show, "Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan," couldn't be more splendidly esoteric, focusing as it does on that most perennially opaque of the earth's remote regions, the vast steppe-lands of Eurasia...

Read the entire article online at wsj.com.

His research interests include relationships between visual forms (architecture, bronze vessels, pictorial carvings and murals, etc.) and ritual, social memory, and political discourses in early Chinese art. He also serves as Director for the Center for the Art of East Asia and Consulting Curator at the Smart Museum of Art.

Election to the APS honors extraordinary achievements in all fields, representing leading scholars in a wide variety of academic disciplines representing over 24 countries.  Founded by Benjamin Franklin and based in Philadelphia, the Society accepts nominations for membership only from Resident members of the APS. More information can be found at http://www.amphilsoc.org/about.

Anne Porter, one of ISAW's visiting research scholars in 2007-08, has announced the publication of her new book, Mobile Pastoralism and the Formation of Near Eastern Civilizations, by Cambridge University Press. Much of the research was undertaken during Dr. Porter's time at ISAW. The book argues that mobile and sedentary populations were not fundamentally separate groups, but formed integral parts of the same polities throughout greater Mesopotamia during the period 4000 to 1500 BCE. She draws on a wide range of archaeological and cuneiform sources to show how networks of social structure, political and religious ideology, and everyday as well as ritual practice, worked to maintain the integrity of those groups when the pursuit of different subsistence activities dispersed them over space. Dr. Porter also shows how these networks shaped many of the key events and innovations of the time, including the Uruk expansion and the introduction of writing, so-called secondary state formation and the organization and operation of government, the literary production of the Third Dynasty of Ur and the first stories of Gilgamesh, and the emergence of the Amorrites in the second millennium BCE.

The American Numismatic Society will open a new exhibition on Signs of Inflation at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York on March 30, 2012. Organized by Gilles Bransbourg, ANS Assistant Roman Curator and ISAW Research Associate, the exhibition displays a range of materials, including ancient coins, money-shells and banknotes, and examines the role of inflation from Imperial Rome to contemporary Zimbabwe. For more information, see the ANS website at http://www.numismatics.org/Exhibits/SignsofInflation.

March 7 - June 3, 2012

Nomads and Networks is the first U.S. exhibition to provide a comprehensive overview of the fascinating nomadic culture of the peoples of eastern Kazakhstan’s Altai and Tianshan regions from roughly the eighth to first centuries bce. With over 250 objects on loan from Kazakhstan’s four national museums, the exhibition provides a compelling portrait that challenges the traditional view of these nomadic societies as less developed than sedentary ones.

Cambridge University Press has just published From the Ptolemies to the Romans: Political and economic change in Egypt, by Andrew Monson, Assistant Professor of Classics at NYU and an affiliated faculty member at ISAW.

In this book, Monson looks at the impact of the coming of Roman rule to Egypt, using theoretical perspectives from the social sciences as well as a reexamination of the extensive papyrological evidence to argue for a primary importance for fiscal reform as an agent of change.

More information is available from the publisher's website.

The Spring 2012 issue of ISAW’s newsletter is now available.  Issue 6 includes a preview of the Nomads and Networks exhibition, publications and research updates from the ISAW community, and event listings for Spring 2012 and beyond.  To download an electronic copy of the newsletter, click here.

A joint Italian-American team is excavating Kinik Hoyuk, a pre-classical, intact site from the “forgotten kingdom of Tuwana” in southern Cappadocia, Turkey. This wealthy region once controlled the passage between Europe and Asia. The site will become an open-air museum. Recent press coverage includes:

ANSAmed: Turkey http://www.ansamed.info/ansamed/en/news/nations/turkey/2012/02/10/visualizza_new.html_77413658.html

Archaeological News http://archaeologicalnews.tumblr.com/post/17379036571

Archaeology.org http://www.archaeology.org/news/

Historum: history discussion forum http://www.historum.com/ancient-history/38035-kingdom-tuwana-anatolia-has-been-found.html

Also published in La Stampa, on 13 Feb 2012, “Un antico regno sepolto”, p. 3 (not currently available online).

A long article in Italian and Turkish, authored by Prof. d'Alfonso and Dr. Mehmet Isikli, Dean of the Dept. of Archaeology at Erzurum University, is forthcoming in the journal Arkeoloji ve Sanat.

In a paper just published in the Journal for the History of Astronomy, Stašo Forenbaher (Institute for Anthropological Research, Zagreb) and Alexander Jones (ISAW) announce the discovery of ivory fragments of a Hellenistic astrologer's board in a part of a cave in southern Croatia that was sealed off towards the end of the first century BCE after having served as a cultic sanctuary. The board, which an astrologer would have used to display to his client the arrangement of heavenly bodies in a horoscope, is the oldest such object known to exist. It witnesses the rapid spread of Greek horoscopic astrology, which came into existence as a fusion of Mesopotamian and Egyptian astral divination with Greek cosmology probably not long before 100 BCE.

Nakovana Cave overlooks the Adriatic Sea from a ridge near the western tip of Pelješac Peninsula, 100 kilometers northwest of Dubrovnik. Some of the most important Adriatic sea-lines of antiquity pass through the channels below the cave. The Nakovana Project (directed by Timothy Kaiser and Stašo Forenbaher) began work at the cave in 1999, and towards the end of the field season a hitherto unknown extension of the cave was discovered. Fragments of pottery vessels were lying about, most of them Hellenistic finewares datable to the last four centuries BCE, evidently the accumulated remains from cult offerings. The ivory fragments were discovered among this material.

When complete, the board had twelve arc-shaped ivory plates forming a complete circle and representing the twelve signs of the zodiac. An astrologer would have displayed a horoscope by placing colored stones standing for the Sun, Moon, and planets in the places they occupied in the zodiac on a particular date, for example a client's birthdate. It is not clear whether the board was actually used where its remains were found in Nakovana cave or whether it was deposited there as a precious offering.

The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University is pleased to announce the appointment of Robert G. Hoyland as Professor of Late Antique and Early Islamic Middle Eastern History.

Professor Hoyland studied early Islamic history at the University of Oxford where he earned his DPhil in 1994. Prior to coming to ISAW he was Professor of Islamic History at the University of Oxford. He also held previous positions at St. Andrews University and UCLA, and was both a Fulbright (Princeton University) and Erasmus scholar (Groningen University). His scholarly interests lie with the history, languages, and literature of the late antique and early Islamic Middle East, more specifically the relations between Muslims, Jews, and Christians, the links between identity, religion, and ethnicity, and the transmission of knowledge from the Ancient world to the Islamic world.

Prof. Hoyland is the author of Seeing Islam as Others Saw it: A survey and analysis of the Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian writings on Islam (1997), and Arabia and the Arabs from the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam (2001). His most recent books include Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle: and the Circulation of Historical Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (2011) and Doctrine and Debate in the East Christian World, 300-1500 (with Averil Cameron, 2011). He is also a member of the editorial committee of the Library of Arabic Literature, which aims to establish a Loeb-style translation series for Arabic texts, to be published with NYU Press, and is involved in the Oxford excavation of Andarin, a Byzantine/Early Islamic town in Syria.

Please join us in welcoming Prof. Hoyland to our community this fall.

ISAW will host the Linked Ancient World Data Institute (LAWDI) from May 31st to June 2nd, 2012 in New York City. Applications are due 17 February 2012.

LAWDI, funded by the Office of Digital Humanities of the National Endowment for Humanities, will bring together an international faculty of practitioners working in the field of Linked Data with twenty attendees who are implementing or planning the creation of digital resources.

More information, including a list of faculty, and application instructions are available at the LAWDI page on the Digital Classicist wiki.

In recent days two of ISAW's flagship online resources — the Ancient World Image Bank and the Pleiades gazetteer — significantly advanced our mission to connect and contextualize information about the ancient world on the web. Photos posted by ISAW and other AWIB collaborators on the Flickr.com photo sharing website are now directly linked with Pleiades place resources and vice versa.

Many people have worked to make this a reality; the heavy lifting was done by Nate Nagy and Iris Fernandez on AWIB, Sean Gillies on Pleiades, and Daniel Bogan at Flickr.  Their work makes it easy to feature thumbnails and lists of related images on individual Pleiades pages and to provide historical-geographic context to photos on Flickr.

You can read more about how all this works in two blog posts by Sean Gillies: one on the Pleiades News Blog and another (a guest blog post) on the Flickr Code Blog.

ISAW is happy to announce the launch of ISAW Papers, an open-content scholarly journal that publishes article-length works on any topic within the scope of ISAW's scholarly research. The first paper has just been published: "A New Discovery of a Component of Greek Astrology in Babylonian Tablets: The 'Terms'", by Alexander Jones and John M. Steele.

Oleksandr V. Symonenko, ISAW Visiting Research Scholar 2009-10, has just published a new book in Russian entitled The Roman Import from the North Pontic Sarmatians (St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg State University Faculty of Philology Press, 2011). Dr. Symonenko is the 2011-12 Glassman Holland Research Fellow at the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. He is also Chief Research Fellow of the Institute of Archaeology at the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences.

The tax account occupies more than 50 pages of a codex in the British Library, long known but never published. Its more than 1500 lines give us the names of landowners and the amounts of money they paid for the land tax in 546/7. Rich and poor, men and women, living people and estates, institutions and individuals all appear, giving us a close look at how wealth was divided in an entire village and at the workings of the taxation system.

The volume, A Sixth-century Tax Register from the Hermopolite Nome, has just been published by ISAW Director Roger Bagnall together with James G. Keenan and Leslie S. B. MacCoull in American Studies in Papyrology. It is available from the David Brown Book Company (US) and Oxbow Books (UK).

Gilles Bransbourg, an ISAW Research Associate and Assistant Roman Curator at the American Numismatic Society, has written an article published in the current edition of Newsweek Magazine on what Ancient Rome can teach us about the current debt crisis and the euro. Click here to read the online edition. For more information on Dr. Bransbourg, visit his ISAW profile here.

The latest issue of ISAW’s newsletter is now available.  Issue 5 includes introductions to our new faculty, scholars, and graduate students, fieldwork and research updates, and exhibitions and academic event listings for Fall 2011 and beyond.  To download an electronic copy of the newsletter, click here.

Dr. Deborah Klimburg-Salter is Professor for Asian Art History at the Institute for Art History, University of Vienna. She has also been a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Oxford, The Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes, and Wellesley College. She specializes in South and Central Asian art history and is the author of numerous books and articles including Tabo Monastery: Art and History (2005) , Tabo: a lamp for a kingdom: Early Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Art in the Western Himalaya (1997), and The Cultural History of Western Tibet (ed. with Junyun, Tauscher, and Yuan 2008). She is a member of the European Association of South Asian Archaeologists in Western Europe (EASAA) and since 2007 has directed the research project "The Cultural History of the Western Himalaya from the 8th Century" at the National Research Network, sponsored by the Austrian Science Fund.

Dr. Klimburg-Salter will be presenting a lecture at ISAW on Tuesday, November 8th at 6pm on "New Archaeological Discoveries in Afghanistan: Mes Aynak, Tepe Naranj and the Buddhist Art of the Kabul River Valley".