I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the scholars who have contributed to this book. Their contributions have consisted in scrutinizing all the entries relevant to their fields of expertise, and in a large number of cases making amendments and providing additional material. These amendments and additions have often been substantial. In some cases, they have totally rewritten my original entries, and have also provided a number of new entries. In these cases, I have specifically indicated their authorship. But I would stress that their contributions have gone far beyond the entries directly attributed to them. The book as a whole has benefited enormously from the time and expertise which they have devoted to it.
CYPRUS
Jennifer M. Webb received her first degree in Classics and Ancient History from the University of Melbourne. She subsequently worked on a number of excavations in Greece, Cyprus, and Jordan, and completed the degree of Doctor of Philosophy for the University of Melbourne in 1988. Since 1991, she has co-directed three major excavation projects in Cyprus, primarily on settlement and cemetery sites of the Early and Middle Bronze Ages. Her research interests include the material culture of Bronze Age Cyprus, with a particular focus on pottery and glyptic, and the archaeology of households and communities. Her monographs include Ritual Architecture, Iconography and Practice in the Late Cypriot Bronze Age (Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology and Literature Pocket-book 75, 1999); Marki Alonia: An Early and Middle Bronze Age Settlement in Cyprus, with D. Frankel (Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology CXXIII, 2006), and The Bronze Age Cemeteries at Deneia in Cyprus, with D. Frankel (Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology CXXXV, 2007). She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and currently a Research Fellow in the Archaeology Program at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.
IRAN AND CENTRAL ASIA
Daniel T. Potts is the Edwin Cuthbert Hall Professor of Middle Eastern Archaeology at the University of Sydney. His research interests cover broadly the archaeology and early history of Iran, the Persian Gulf, Mesopotamia, the Indo-Iranian borderlands, and Central Asia. His publications include Mesopotamian Civilization: The Material Foundations (Cornell, 1997), The Archaeology of Elam (Cambridge, 1999), Excavations at Tepe
Yahya 1967—1975: The Third Millennium (Cambridge, MA, 2001), and edited volumes including Archaeology of the United Arab Emirates, with H. Al Naboodah and P. Hellyer (Trident, 2003); The Mamasani Archaeological Project Stage One: A Report on the First Two Seasons of the ICAR—University of Sydney Expedition to the Mamasani District, Fars Province, Iran, with K. Roustaei (Tehran, 2006); and Memory as History: The Legacy of Alexander in Asia, with H. P. Ray (New Delhi, 2007). He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
MESOPOTAMIA
Heather D. Baker, a graduate in Archaeology from the University of Cambridge, has participated in numerous excavations in Britain, Cyprus, Jordan, Turkey, and especially Iraq. At the University of Oxford she gained an MPhil in Cuneiform Studies and a DPhil in Assyriology. Her research interests lie primarily in the social and economic history and material culture of Babylonia and Assyria in the first millennium BCE. Since January 2003, she has been working as a researcher with the START Project on ‘The Economic History of Babylonia in the first millennium BC’ at the University of Vienna. Her publications include a monograph, The Archive of the Nappahu Family (Vienna, 2004), and (as editor) The Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Part 2/I (Helsinki, 2000), Part 2/II (Helsinki, 2001), Part 3/I (Helsinki, 2002), and Approaching the Babylonian Economy, with M. Jursa (Munster, 2005). She is currently working on a monograph, now nearing completion, on the urban landscape in first millennium BCE Babylonia.
SYRIA AND PALESTINE
Jonathan N. Tubb is Curator of the Ancient Levant in the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum, a post he has held since 1978. He trained in Levantine archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology in London, and began his field career in Syria and Iraq in the 1970s. For ten years he served as Assistant Director of the Institute’s excavations in Syria — at Qadesh (Tell Nebi Mend) on the Orontes. In 1984, he excavated the Early Bronze Age site of Tiwal esh-Sharqi in the Jordan valley on behalf of the British Museum, and in 1985 began excavations at the nearby major site of Tell es-STidiyeh, a project which is continuing to this day. An expert on Canaanite civilization, he is the author of many articles and several books on Levantine archaeology, including Archaeology and the Bible (London, 1990) and Canaanites (London, 2006). He lectures internationally, and for several years was Program Chair of the American Schools of Oriental Research. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and is currently President of the Palestine Exploration Fund, a society founded in 1865 to promote the scientific exploration of the Levant.
URARTU
Paul Zimansky is currently a Professor of Archaeology and Ancient History at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Since taking his PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago in 1980, he has directed archaeological projects in Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. Much of his research has focused on Urartu, a field in which he began working as a graduate student with the German Archaeological Institute in excavating at Bastam, Iran, in the 1970s. His publications include Ecology and Empire: The Structure of the Urartian State (Chicago, 1985), Ancient Ararat: A Handbook of Urartian Studies (Delmar, 1998), The Iron Age Settlement at Ain Dara, Syria, with E. C. Stone (Oxford, 1999), The Anatomy of a Mesopotamian City: Survey and Soundings at Mashkan-shapir, with E. C. Stone (Winona Lake, 2004), and Ancient Turkey, with A. Sagona (Abingdon, 2009).
World History
