A unique history of the ancient Near East that compellingly presents the life stories of kings, priestesses, merchants, bricklayers, and others\nIn this sweeping history of the ancient Near East, Amanda Podany takes readers on a gripping journey from the creation of the world's first cities to the conquests of Alexander the Great. The book is built around the life stories of many ancient men and women, from kings, priestesses, and merchants to brickmakers, musicians, and weavers. Their habits of daily life, beliefs, triumphs, and crises, and the changes that people faced over time are explored through their own written words and the buildings, cities, and empires in which they lived.\nRather than chronicling three thousand years of rulers and states, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings instead creates a tapestry of life stories through which readers will come to know specific individuals from many walks of life, and to understand their places within the broad history of events and institutions in the ancient Near East. These life stories are preserved on ancient clay tablets, which allow us to trace, for example, the career of a weaver as she advanced to become a supervisor of a workshop, listen to a king trying to persuade his generals to prepare for a siege, and feel the pain of a starving young couple and their four young children as they suffered through a time of famine. What might seem at first glance to be a remote and inaccessible ancient culture proves to be a comprehensible world, one that bequeathed to the modern world many of our institutions and beliefs, a truly fascinating place to visit.

Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East

History

Podany, Amanda H.

Ancient Civilizations

Oxford University Press

What do the wheel, the law, and belief in a single god have in common? All of these ideas first came to people who lived in the ancient Near East. As if these revolutionary developments weren't enough to make a mark on world history, these ancient innovators also came up with the most fantastic invention of all-writing. The Ancient Near Eastern World is filled with the scribes, potters, sculptors, architects, school children, lawmakers, kings, queens, farmers, and priests who designed and created that world.

The Ancient Near Eastern World (The ^AWorld in Ancient Times)

McGee, Marni

The Student Study Guides are important and unique components that are available for each of the books in The World in Ancient Times series. Each of the Student Study Guides is designed to be used with the main text at school or sent home for homework assignments. The activities in the Student Study guide will help students get the most out of their history books. Each student study guide includes a chapter-by-chapter two-page lesson that uses a variety of interesting activities to help a student master history and develop important reading and study skills.

Student Study Guide to The Ancient Near Eastern World (The ^AWorld in Ancient Times)

Teen & Young Adult

Education & Reference

The World in Ancient Times is a unique series of books that tells the story of the ancient world using a broad range of primary sources, from Homer's Odyssey to a Mesopotamian marriage contract, from the Buddha's Four Noble Truths to a Maya altar with hieroglyphs. These documents help students take an active role in understanding history. The World in Ancient Times Primary Sources and Reference Volume brings together 76 additional documents from all the regions covered in the series. From the ancient Near Eastern epic Gilgamesh to an Aztec poem, from Chinese oracle bones to a comic tale from the Pancha-tantra, a South Asian story collection, this volume paints the colorful history of the ancient world in vivid detail. Students will also find letters, diary entries, laws, fables, plays, poems, sermons, schoolbooks, proverbs, and even graffiti in this fascinating volume. Each excerpt is set in context by an introduction, and helpful marginal notes define unfamiliar words and identify the proper names within the text. For each source, there is a handy guide to further reading on the topic. This sourcebook also contains a world map, a cast of characters, and a timeline that help students understand how the histories of the various regions of the ancient world fit together as a whole. A thematic index helps students compare documents on topics of interest across the ancient world. A comprehensive index to the entire World in Ancient Times series completes this engaging volume.

The World in Ancient Times: Primary Sources & Reference Volume (The ^AWorld in Ancient Times)

Mellor, Ronald

Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East

Amanda Podany here takes readers on a vivid tour through a thousand years of ancient Near Eastern history, from 2300 to 1300 BCE, paying particular attention to the lively interactions that took place between the great kings of the day. Allowing them to speak in their own words, Podany reveals how these leaders and their ambassadors devised a remarkably sophisticated system of diplomacy and trade. What the kings forged, as they saw it, was a relationship of friends-brothers-across hundreds of miles. Over centuries they worked out ways for their ambassadors to travel safely to one another's capitals, they created formal rules of interaction and ways to work out disagreements, they agreed to treaties and abided by them, and their efforts had paid off with the exchange of luxury goods that each country wanted from the other. Tied to one another through peace treaties and powerful obligations, they were also often bound together as in-laws, as a result of marrying one another's daughters. These rulers had almost never met one another in person, but they felt a strong connection--a real brotherhood--which gradually made wars between them less common. Indeed, any one of the great powers of the time could have tried to take over the others through warfare, but diplomacy usually prevailed and provided a respite from bloodshed. Instead of fighting, the kings learned from one another, and cooperated in peace. A remarkable account of a pivotal moment in world history--the establishment of international diplomacy thousands of years before the United Nations--Brotherhood of Kings offers a vibrantly written history of the region often known as the "cradle of civilization."

The ancient Near East is known as the "cradle of civilization"--and for good reason. Mesopotamia, Syria, and Anatolia were home to an extraordinarily rich and successful culture. Indeed, it was a time and place of earth-shaking changes for humankind: the beginnings of writing and law, kingship and bureaucracy, diplomacy and state-sponsored warfare, mathematics and literature. This Very Short Introduction offers a fascinating account of this momentous time in human history. The three thousand years covered here--from around 3500 BCE, with the founding of the first Mesopotamian cities, to the conquest of the Near East by the Persian king Cyrus the Great in 539 BCE-represent a period of incredible innovation, from the invention of the wheel and the plow, to early achievements in astronomy, law, and diplomacy. As historian Amanda Podany explores this era, she overturns the popular image of the ancient world as a primitive, violent place. We discover that women had many rights and freedoms: they could own property, run businesses, and represent themselves in court. Diplomats traveled between the capital cities of major powers ensuring peace and friendship between the kings. Scribes and scholars studied the stars and could predict eclipses and the movements of the planets. Every chapter introduces the reader to a particular moment in ancient Near Eastern history, illuminating such aspects as trade, religion, diplomacy, law, warfare, kingship, and agriculture. Each discussion focuses on evidence provided in two or three cuneiform texts from that time. These documents, the cities in which they were found, the people and gods named in them, the events they recount or reflect, all provide vivid testimony of the era in which they were written. About the Series: Oxford's Very Short Introductions series offers concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects--from Islam to Sociology, Politics to Classics, Literary Theory to History, and Archaeology to the Bible. Not simply a textbook of definitions, each volume in this series provides trenchant and provocative--yet always balanced and complete--discussions of the central issues in a given discipline or field. Every Very Short Introduction gives a readable evolution of the subject in question, demonstrating how the subject has developed and how it has influenced society. Eventually, the series will encompass every major academic discipline, offering all students an accessible and abundant reference library. Whatever the area of study that one deems important or appealing, whatever the topic that fascinates the general reader, the Very Short Introductions series has a handy and affordable guide that will likely prove indispensable.

The Ancient Near East: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

A unique history of the ancient Near East that compellingly presents the life stories of kings, priestesses, merchants, bricklayers, and others In this sweeping history of the ancient Near East, Amanda Podany takes readers on a gripping journey from the creation of the world's first cities to the conquests of Alexander the Great. The book is built around the life stories of many ancient men and women, from kings, priestesses, and merchants to brickmakers, musicians, and weavers. Their habits of daily life, beliefs, triumphs, and crises, and the changes that people faced over time are explored through their own written words and the buildings, cities, and empires in which they lived. Rather than chronicling three thousand years of rulers and states, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings instead creates a tapestry of life stories through which readers will come to know specific individuals from many walks of life, and to understand their places within the broad history of events and institutions in the ancient Near East. These life stories are preserved on ancient clay tablets, which allow us to trace, for example, the career of a weaver as she advanced to become a supervisor of a workshop, listen to a king trying to persuade his generals to prepare for a siege, and feel the pain of a starving young couple and their four young children as they suffered through a time of famine. What might seem at first glance to be a remote and inaccessible ancient culture proves to be a comprehensible world, one that bequeathed to the modern world many of our institutions and beliefs, a truly fascinating place to visit.

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Hana was a Syrian kingdom located in the Middle Euphrates region north of Mari, which included the ancient city of Terqa. Hana is known only from a few dozen texts, but those texts are dated to the reigns of between nineteen and twenty-one kings. There is no king-list that includes the kings of Hana and the kingdom almost never is mentioned in documents from other cities and kingdoms. Nevertheless, Hana seems to have been one of the few kingdoms that thrived in the sixteenth century B.C.E., an era that is poorly understood.In this volume Dr. Prodany demonstrates how the kings of Hana can be placed in sequence and assigned approximate dates, based on typologies of the main features of a group of texts that make up the majority of the corpus - contracts for the purchase, bequest, and inheritance of real estate.

The Land of Hana: Kings, Chronology, and Scribal Tradition

Eisenbrauns

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Podany, Amanda H.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Podany, Amanda H.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Podany, Amanda H.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East

The Ancient Near Eastern World (The ^AWorld in Ancient Times)

Student Study Guide to The Ancient Near Eastern World (The ^AWorld in Ancient Times)

The World in Ancient Times: Primary Sources & Reference Volume (The ^AWorld in Ancient Times)

Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East

The Ancient Near East: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East

Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East

The Land of Hana: Kings, Chronology, and Scribal Tradition