Both the textual record and the archaeological record from the ancient Mesopotamia provide evidence for a rich array of human activities over more than three millennia. The vast majority of known cuneiform tablets lack secure archaeological provenience, and few large groups of t…
The subject of this dissertation is the use of supplemental graphic conventions (scribal auxiliary marks) in the Amarna corpus and in the cuneiform alphabetic texts discovered at Ugarit. Following an overview of the purpose of supplemental graphic conventions in written communic…
The tell of Ras Shamra on the Mediterranean coast of Syria has yielded thousands of cuneiform tablets which shed light on the scribal traditions of ancient Ugarit, a city-state which flourished during the latter part of the Late Bronze Age. This dissertation treats one aspect of…
Nippur, the center of Sumerian culture, located about 120 miles south of modern day Baghdad, Iraq, produced important cuneiform documents for 2000 years, from the middle of the third millennium B.C. The University of Pennsylvania launched the first U.S. archaeological expedition…
The author aims to prove that certain first millennium Mesopotamian rulers exercised a carefully planned--politically motivated--strategy of aggression, strengthened by religious factors, against their neighbors, in pursuit of political gains. The author argues that scholars hav…
This dissertation examines the KRT text, three clay tablets, from Ras Shamra/Ugarit in the second millennium B.C. and provides a paleographic overview of the scribal patterns. Surveying previous publications related to the KRT text, the study concludes that the collative and tra…