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ISAW's open house for prospective doctoral students will include coffee with ISAW students, faculty, and scholars; an information session about our academic program; a tour of ISAW and the ISAW Library; a Q&A session with current students; and sessions on archaeology, digital humanities, & exhibitions at ISAW.

The Russian Academy of Sciences recently established in Egypt an institution for studying the ancient history of Egypt – the Institute of Egyptology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Institute was allowed to select a monument among those not yet investigated. The Institute selected the site of the Palace Apries on Kom Tuman.

Note: We are now fully booked for this event and are only accepting names for the wait-list.

Human migration is and has always been an important component of settled life, impacting all sectors of society. Migration often occurs in the context of the exercise of power by large states and empires. While scholars of migration and ethnicity tend to focus on identity dynamics at the peripheries of such polities, the impact of migration on central heartland regions is potentially more ripe for exploration. Though expansionist actions directly impact borderlands, the resultant flow of migrants to heartlands creates an inter-ethnic hotbed. This phenomenon is problematized in the title of this conference via an intentional play on the terms “melting pot” and “salad bowl.” First used to describe social identity dynamics of migrants to the United States of America, the mixing of these metaphors accentuates the multiplicity of possible developments of identity that arise after immigration to the heartlands of powerful polities. Instead of insisting on a binary approach, this conference brings together expert scholars from multiple fields to explore the dynamics of ethnic identity in state and imperial heartlands in a variety of ancient, pre-modern, modern, and contemporary contexts, in order to investigate the gamut of historical and social developments that result from such migrations.

The 20,000 cuneiform tablets found in the palace at Mari provide a wealth of evidence for the world of the 18th century B.C.E. This presentation focuses on the documents that shed light on the connections between Mari and Minoan Crete. Thanks to much recent Assyriological work, the corpus of relevant texts has nearly tripled since Aegean specialists last considered them. Two historical nuggets of considerable significance for Aegeanists emerge from my present study. In addition, I discuss for the first time what the Mariote scribes might have been looking at and attempting to describe when they made their inventories of Cretan goods.

Assyria, in its last or Neo-Assyrian phase of the first millennium BC, was the first universal empire in the ancient Near East. It was an imposing, indeed terrifying colossus to the many states and peoples that fell under its sway, two of which were ancient Israel and Judah. The Neo-Assyrian empire was a highly complicated and sophisticated entity, in which ruling elites and subjects interacted not simply in the military, political, and economic arenas, but, intertwined with them, in the cultural, especially the ideological, arena as well. In short, Assyria was more than a colossus of brute force; it imposed itself on its subjects as a powerful ideological system. The analysis of this system and its relationship to the other arenas of the empire has formed an important part of contemporary study of Neo-Assyria. In this study, scholars have drawn on the evidence, both written and non-written, of the Assyrian ruling elites themselves, but also of their various subject states and peoples. And from the latter, easily the most important evidence, because of its extent, variety, and depth of engagement with Assyria, has been the principal monument of ancient Israel and Judah, namely, the Hebrew Bible.

Knossos in Crete is one of the most frequented archaeological sites in the world. Visitors to the prehistoric Palace of Knossos are greeted by a bronze bust of the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans who excavated, restored and interpreted the monument in the early 20th century, thus leaving us with an everlasting legacy on the archaeology of Crete and the Aegean. A few months ago, a second bust was erected near the first one and it shows the little-known Cretan businessman and antiquarian Minos Kalokairinos (1843-1907). Kalokairinos was the first to excavate Knossos more than two decades before Evans, and the first to discover its palace in a brief and poorly documented campaign in 1878. Although his work attracted international attention at the time, it was quickly overshadowed by the much more extensive and well-documented research of Evans and it remained entirely overlooked for nearly a century. However, recent scholarship increasingly appreciates the pioneering investigations of the Cretan antiquarian.