Assyrian Stone Vessels and Related Material in the British Museum

Ann Searight · Julian Reade · Irving Finkel

Jul 2008 · Oxbow Books

About this ebook

This catalogue makes available more than 600 complete or fragmentary stone vessels kept in the British Museum. Most of them were excavated at Nineveh and other major sites in northern Iraq and Syria, and are presented here for the first time. They range in date from prehistory down to the Persian and Hellenistic periods; the bulk belong in the eighth and seventh centuries, when the Near East under Assyrian rule grew increasingly cosmopolitan. The collection includes luxury items made for palaces and temples, often bearing royal inscriptions, besides many perfume-jars, mortars and other vessels for practical use. The catalogue incorporates extensive information on material culture, art, technology, economic relationships, and social and religious practices, and will be used by historians, archaeologists, philologists and anthropologists alike.

About the author

Irving Finkel, philologist and Assyriologist, is a spellbinding storyteller and a familiar figure in academic and literary circles. He is the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures in the Department of the Middle East in the British Museum, where he reads cuneiform inscriptions on tablets of clay from ancient Mesopotamia. An expert on the history of board games, he is also the author of many children’s books as well as the best-selling The Ark Before Noah, which recounts his discovery of a cuneiform tablet that contained a Flood narrative far older than the story of Noah and which led to the recreation of the ark for a 2014 TV documentary.