Skip to main content

We are currently upgrading our shopping cart; in the interim all orders are being diverted to Waterstones. If you would like to redeem a promotional code, or are an author wanting to place an order, please email us.

Contact us

Blog Archives

War Essays

Cover of the book War Essays by Zainab Bahrani, published by UCL Press. The cover features an abstract, burnt and weathered parchment design with fragments of red and black imagery.

More than 20 years have passed since Iraq was invaded in an illegal war, justified on the basis of falsified evidence. Operation Iraqi Freedom led to untold human suffering and massive destruction, the ruinous consequences of which persist to this very day. The war and occupation also had a devastating impact on the history and heritage of Iraq, a land ironically seen as the cradle of civilisation. The scale of theft and destruction of heritage sent shockwaves around the world that had radical consequences for the trade in antiquities and museum practices across the globe, and contributed to a paradigm shift in the discipline of archaeology.

In War Essays Zainab Bahrani charts the devastation, cultural cleansing and targeted erasure of Iraq’s past, and argues that the topics of archaeology, history and memory must be analysed within the larger geopolitical issues of the contemporary Middle East. The essays present a counter-narrative of events that historicize the position of the historian and illustrate the enduring colonial practices of archaeology. Set within a narrative that reflects at once upon the violence of war and the processes of writing, an archaeologist’s personal journey unfolds. War Essays intertwines the autobiographical with the historical and analytical aspects of scholarship, weaving an eye-witness account of war with theoretical discussions around writing, the relationship of monuments, historical landscapes and memory, and how one’s sense of place in the world is disrupted by war.

Scribal Worlds

Scribal Worlds: Scholarship and classification in cuneiform cultures delves into the history of the earliest writing cultures of the ancient Middle East, bridging disciplines such as ancient history, philology, semiotics, material culture studies and philosophy of science. Bringing together scholars in the fields of Assyriology, History of Science and Art History, the collection examines how language, ontology, classification and scribal learning shaped cuneiform traditions. Through focused textual and material case studies, contributors employ diverse heuristic tools to reconstruct the intellectual frameworks of scribal cultures and the transmission of knowledge. Inspired by and in appreciation of the work of Niek Veldhuis, this collaborative and timely exploration highlights the interwoven nature of classification and scholarship within cuneiform studies, demonstrating how specific texts, object groups and practices can be interpreted within their cultural contexts. By critically analysing and reframing these sources, the volume exemplifies how scholars extract meaning from even the most fragmentary evidence – truly ‘squeezing juice out of stones’.

Revolutionizing a World

This book investigates the long-term continuity of large-scale states and empires, and its effect on the Near East’s social fabric, including the fundamental changes that occurred to major social institutions. Its geographical coverage spans, from east to west, modern-day Libya and Egypt to Central Asia, and from north to south, Anatolia to southern Arabia, incorporating modern-day Oman and Yemen. Its temporal coverage spans from the late eighth century BCE to the seventh century CE during the rise of Islam and collapse of the Sasanian Empire.

The authors argue that the persistence of large states and empires starting in the eighth/seventh centuries BCE, which continued for many centuries, led to new socio-political structures and institutions emerging in the Near East. The primary processes that enabled this emergence were large-scale and long-distance movements, or population migrations. These patterns of social developments are analysed under different aspects: settlement patterns, urban structure, material culture, trade, governance, language spread and religion, all pointing at movement as the main catalyst for social change. This book’s argument is framed within a larger theoretical framework termed as ‘universalism’, a theory that explains many of the social transformations that happened to societies in the Near East, starting from the Neo-Assyrian period and continuing for centuries.

Early Civilization and the American Modern

The cover of the book ‘Early Civilization and the American Modern: Images of Middle Eastern Origins in the United States 1893–1939’ by Eva Miller features a grayscale photograph of a stylized human figure sculpture within an architectural structure. The background shows a clear sky and the corner of another building, suggesting an outdoor setting. The title and author’s name are prominently displayed in white text against the dark backdrop, with the UCL Press logo at the bottom.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a particular story about the United States’ role in the long history of world civilization was constructed in public spaces, through public art and popular histories. This narrative posited that civilization and its benefits – science, law, writing, art and architecture – began in Egypt and Mesopotamia before passing ever further westward, towards a triumphant culmination on the American continent.

Early Civilization and the American Modern explores how this teleological story answered anxieties about the United States’ unique role in the long march of progress. Eva Miller focuses on important figures who collaborated on the creation of a visual, progressive narrative in key institutions, world’s fairs and popular media: Orientalist and public intellectual James Henry Breasted, astronomer George Ellery Hale, architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, and decorative artists Lee Lawrie and Hildreth Meière. At a time when new information about the ancient Middle East was emerging through archaeological excavation, ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia appeared simultaneously old and new. This same period was crucial to the development of public space and civic life across the United States, as a shared sense of historical consciousness was actively pursued by politicians, philanthropists, intellectuals, architects and artists.

Ancient Knowledge Networks

Ancient Knowledge Networks is a book about how knowledge travels, in minds and bodies as well as in writings. It explores the forms knowledge takes and the meanings it accrues, and how these meanings are shaped by the peoples who use it.

Addressing the relationships between political power, family ties, religious commitments and literate scholarship in the ancient Middle East of the first millennium BC, Eleanor Robson focuses on two regions where cuneiform script was the predominant writing medium: Assyria in the north of modern-day Syria and Iraq, and Babylonia to the south of modern-day Baghdad. She investigates how networks of knowledge enabled cuneiform intellectual culture to endure and adapt over the course of five world empires until its eventual demise in the mid-first century BC. In doing so, she also studies Assyriological and historical method, both now and over the past two centuries, asking how the field has shaped and been shaped by the academic concerns and fashions of the day. Above all, Ancient Knowledge Networks is an experiment in writing about ‘Mesopotamian science’, as it has often been known, using geographical and social approaches to bring new insights into the intellectual history of the world’s first empires.

Sign up to our newsletter

Don't miss out!
Subscribe to the UCL Press newsletter for the latest open access books,
journal CfPs, news and views from our authors and much more!

Sign up