Introduction

TY - JOUR

T1 - Introduction

AU - Haubold, Johannes

AU - Steele, John

AU - Stevens, Kathryn

N1 - Funding Information: 1 This paper draws on research carried out for the Geography of Knowledge project (http:// oracc.org/cams/gkab), 2007–12, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/E509258/1), and during an Alexander Humboldt Foundation Bessel Forschungspreis 2011–12. I warmly thank gkab project members Marie-Françoise Besnier, Philippe Clancier, Graham Cunningham, Frances Reynolds, Steve Tinney and Greta Van Buylaere and the De-partment of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge; and express par-ticular gratitude to Professor Stefan Maul, my host in Heidelberg. Funding Information: * This chapter is a revised version of Yasuyuki Mitsuma, “Relationship between Greco-Macedonian Citizens and ‘Council of Elders’ in the Arsacid Period: Attested in the Hitherto Unpublished Astronomical Diary BM 35269+35347+35358”, Bulletin of the Society for Near Eastern Studies in Japan 58/1 (2015): 30–39 (in Japanese). The research for this chapter was funded by JSPS KAKENHI Grant 26870111, 17H04527, 18H05445, and 18K00987. My thanks go to the Trustees of the British Museum and Irving L. Finkel, who joined the tablet BM 35269 + 35347 + 35358, for allowing me to publish the tablet, and to Cornelia Wunsch and Ran Zadok for their suggestions in reading the text on BM 35269+. I also thank Editage (www.editage.jp) for English language editing. Funding Information: This volume is based on a conference held at Durham University in July 2016, some two decades after the completion of Sachs and Hunger’s groundbreaking edition of the datable fragments. Taking full advantage of that edition, speakers read the Astronomical Diaries in their historical context rather than mining them for abstract astronomical, economic, climatic and historical data. The team of scholars who met in Durham included experts in Assyriology, Classics and Ancient History, the ancient economy, the history of religion and the history of science. Our aim, then, was to reach across disciplinary boundaries in order to gain a better understanding of this truly extraordinary, and extraordinarily influential, ancient chronicle of events in heaven and on earth. We are grateful to all those who contributed to the conference, and to the British Academy, the Institute for Advanced Study at Durham University, and the Department of Classics and Ancient History and Centre for the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East (camne) at Durham for the generous financial and logistical support which made it possible. Above all, we would like to express our gratitude to Hermann Hunger, who responded to the conference papers and who, together with the late Abraham Sachs, laid the textual foundations on which the whole project rests. We hope the resulting volume conveys some of the intellectual excitement of the conference, and in so doing serves as a modest tribute to the work of Hunger, Sachs, and a group of ancient scholars who over a period of more than half a millennium, day and night, rain or shine, good times and bad, kept watch in Babylon. Funding Information: 1 This article was written under the auspices of the project “Diplomatics and palaeography and Neo-and Late Babylonian archival documents” funded by the Austrian Research Fund (fwf). I would like to thank Christopher Walker for access to his extensive files on the tablets from Babylon housed in the British Museum.

PY - 2019

Y1 - 2019

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85101101976&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85101101976&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1163/9789004397767_002

DO - 10.1163/9789004397767_002

M3 - Editorial

AN - SCOPUS:85101101976

SN - 1566-2055

VL - 100

SP - 1

EP - 18

JO - Culture and History of the Ancient Near East

JF - Culture and History of the Ancient Near East

ER -