The study of the ancient Near East poses very particular problems for the historian. First of all, the decipherment of the cuneiform writing system, as well as the study of the dead languages that were written in the script, was an enormous undertaking that took decades. Moreover, the scholar is confronted with the enormous time span of three thousand years of Near Eastern history, much of which occurred before any Classical period writings. However, these periods are not all equally understood. The best one can do is to take numerous bits of information from cuneiform sources, or ‘snapshots’ as one Mesopotamian historian has called them (see A.H. Podany, The Land of Hana: Kings, Chronology, and Scribal Tradition. Bethesda: CDL Press, 2002, p. 2) and attempt to place them in an orderly historical perspective and chronological order. Unlike their Classical counterparts who have the blessing (or perhaps curse in some cases!) of a manuscript tradition, historians of the ancient Near East are confronted with sources that have been buried for millennia. In other words, there is no ‘Babylonian’ Herodotus to provide structure to the thousands of cuneiform inscriptions that have been uncovered since the mid-nineteenth century.

Gonzalo Rubio tackles the enormous source material for southern Mesopotamia and provides insight on topics such as language and ethnicity, land tenure, literature, and the nature of law collections. Moreover, he offers a historical overview of southern Mesopotamia (or Babylonia) in the historically complicated first half of the first millennium.

Steven Garfinkle adeptly provides an overview of the Assyrians of Northern Mesopotamia. Not only does he contribute a synopsis of Assyrian history, he evaluates the source material for this people group, critiques traditional views of the Assyrians, and poses perspectives on future research on Assyria.

Gary Beckman provides a survey of the history of Hittite studies and outlines a number of the challenges concerning the study of the Hittite royal archives, including the difficulty of piecing fragments of tablets together, assigning dates to undated tablets, determining the paleography of the documents, struggling with issues concerning Hittite geography and vocabulary, and wrestling with the problems inherent in the decipherment of the so-called Hittite hieroglyphs.

Daniel Snell writes about inland Syria (or ‘Northern’ Mesopotamia), providing a survey of the recent developments in Syrian archeology and their impact on ancient Near Eastern historical research. Moreover, he also undertakes the task of making sense of Palestinian history, providing a framework for describing the relationship of the Bible and historical studies.

 Chavalas, M.W., Ed.