Originally published in 1849, this early work by traveller, archaeologist and collector Sir Austen Henry Layard is both expensive and hard to find in its first edition. It details the religion, art and military of the ancient city of Nineveh. This is a fascinating read for anyone interested in the history of the Neo Assyrian Empire and its culture. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Ezidi people (Yezidi/Yazidi) and their culture suffered greatly at the hands of Daesh before, during, and after the 2014 Sinjar (Shingal) Genocide. Since the resulting forced migration, the Ezidi ­community as one of the most marginalised societies in the Middle East has undergone a significant amount of society-wide transformation. New avenues for agency have opened, and Shingali Ezidi women have taken these opportunities to express transformed identities, filling spaces previously unavailable, and altering “traditional” gender roles. This first extensive ethnographic work ever conducted with Ezidi women examines origins and developments of transformations in their female identity and agency. The analysis of their expressions and performances is particularly notable because of the subaltern position under numerous layers of minority, e.g. ethnicity, geography, religion, politics, culture, language, as well as gender. The aim of this study is to investigate the utilisation of subaltern identity to actualise agency among women after genocide.

Who are the Assyrians and what role did they play in shaping modern Iraq? Were they simply bystanders, victims of collateral damage who played a passive role in the history of Iraq? And how have they negotiated their position throughout various periods of Iraq's state-building processes?This book details the narrative and history of Iraq in the 20th century and reinserts the Assyrian experience as an integral part of Iraq's broader contemporary historiography. It is the first comprehensive account to contextualize this native people's experience alongside the developmental processes of the modern Iraqi state. Using primary and secondary data, this book offers a nuanced exploration of the dynamics that have affected and determined the trajectory of the Assyrians' experience in 20th century Iraq.

Modern Chaldeans are an Aramaic speaking Catholic Syriac community from northern Iraq, not to be confused with the ancient Mesopotamian civilization of the same name. First identified as 'Chaldean' by the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, this misnomer persisted, developing into a distinctive and unique identity. In modern times, the demands of assimilation in the US, together with increased hostility and sectarian violence in Iraq, gave rise to a complex and transnational identity. Faced with Islamophobia in the US, Chaldeans were at pains to emphasize a Christian identity, and appropriated the ancient, pre-Islamic history of their namesake as a means of distinction between them and other immigrants from Arab lands. In this, the first ethnographic history of the modern Chaldeans, Yasmeen Hanoosh explores these ancient-modern inflections in contemporary Chaldean identity discourses, the use of history as a collective commodity for developing and sustaining a positive community image in the present, and the use of language revival and monumental symbolism to reclaim association with Christian and pre-Christian traditions.