Product Description: Ancient Near East: The Basics surveys the history of the ancient Middle East from the invention of writing to Alexander the Great’s conquest. The book introduces both the physical and intellectual environment of those times, the struggles of state-building and empire construction, and the dissent from those efforts...read more

Product Description: This book is a history of religious life in the Ancient Near East from the beginnings of agriculture to Alexander the Great's invasion in the 300s BCE. Daniel C. Snell traces key developments in the history, daily life, and religious beliefs of the people of Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Israel, and Iran...read more

Product Description: Freedom as a value is older than Greece, as evidence from the Ancient Near East shows us through this book. Snell first looks at words for freedom in the Ancient Near East. Then he examines archival texts to see how runaways expressed their interest in freedom in Mesopotamian history...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Book of Proverbs is permeated with patterns of repetition, yet to date no major work on Proverbs has dealt adequately with this phenomenon. Snell catalogs and analyzes repetitive words and verses and uses the data to draw conclusions about the composition of the book...read more

Product Description: This text presents 125 previously unpublished Neo-Sumerian archival texts from the period around 2030 B.C.E. found in three different sites in southern Iraq. The cuneiform documents, hand-copied by the late Carl H. Lager, are accompanied by detailed indices and explanatory notes by Daniel Snell that guide the reader to relevant bibliography on each lexical item and personal name that appears in the texts...read more