In Context: the Reade Festschrift

by Irving Finkel

In the Reade Festschrift is a collection of invited and peer-reviewed essays by friends and colleagues of Julian Edgeworth Reade, sometime Mesopotamia curator at the British Museum from 1975 to 2000. Its coverage is designed to reflect the breadth of the recipient’s professional interests, from Assyria and Mesopotamia in general, to the relations between Mesopotamia and other regions and the impact of nineteenth-century discoveries on the field of Assyriology. They include both syntheses and archaeological research, as well as reports on archival discoveries. Context is always crucial. Here is fresh work from which any reader can gain a new appreciation of the importance of the ancient Near East.

Table of Contents

Preface

J.E. a bibliography of works (1967–2019)

Part 1: Mesopotamia

Massimo VIDALE et al. – Palaeolithic finds from Nineveh

Juris ZARINS – Ur, Lagash and the a study of late 3rd millennium Mesopotamian archaeology, texts and politics

Irving L. FINKEL – New light on an old game

Sébastien REY – A Seleucid cult of Sumerian royal ancestors in Girsu

Aage WESTENHOLZ – The sins of Nippur

Ariane THOMAS – A royal chariot for Sargon II

John MACGINNIS – The gods of Arbail

Mogens T. LARSEN – The development of Neo-Assyrian narrative toward Assurbanipal’s Ulai river reliefs

Irene WINTER – The harpist’s left a detail from the ‘Banquet Scene’ of Assurbanipal in the North Palace at Nineveh

Simo PARPOLA – The population of Nineveh

St John SIMPSON – Annihilating Assyria

Part 2: Foreign connections

J. Mark KENOYER – Bleached carnelian beads of the Indus Tradition, 3rd millennium origins and variations

Asko PARPOLA – Iconographic evidence of Mesopotamian influence on Harappan ideology and its survival in the royal rites of the Veda and Hinduism

Maurizio CATTANI – The Joint Hadd Project and the Early Bronze Age in south-east Arabia

Stefan KROLL – The location of Mešta in archaeological context

Jonathan N. TUBB – Assyrians in Transjordan

Julie R. ANDERSON – Of Kushite kings and sacred landscapes in the Middle Nile valley

Part 3: Discovery and reception

Dan POTTS – ‘Un coup terrible de la ’ A. Clément and the Qurna disaster of 1855

Stefania ERMIDORO – The William Kennett Loftus legacy to the Near Eastern materials in Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Tim CLAYDEN – ‘Two unpublished drawings of excavations at Nimrud’ revisited

John RUSSELL – A bit of a bull and a bit of a puzzle

Henrietta McCALL and Michael SEYMOUR – George Scharf and Assyrian sculpture

Paul COLLINS – Casts and the reception of Assyria

345 pages, Paperback

Published February 10, 2021

About the author

Irving Leonard Finkel, Ph.D. (Assyriology, University of Birmingham, 1976; B.A., Ancient
New Eastern Studies, University of Birmingham, 1969), is a British philologist and Assyriologist. He has served as Assistant Keeper in the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities at the British Museum since 1979. As such, he is the curator in charge of cuneiform inscriptions on tablets of clay from ancient Mesopotamia, of which the Middle East Department has the largest collection—some 130,000 pieces—of any modern museum. He also is an author of fiction for children, and in 2007 co-founded The Great Diary Project.