The Sumer and Akkad are two of the most ancient civilizations known to men. Reading this resource material will bring you back to Mesopotamia over 7,000 years ago. You will learn how the Sumerians established an advanced writing system, architecture and arts, mathematics and astronomy. You will also read how the Akkadians followed the Sumerians to create the world’s first empire. This book is a must-read!

Transboundary watercourses account for an estimated 60 per cent of global freshwater flow and support the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Yet the indeterminate status of water rights in many international watercourses presents a problem and many attempts to resolve water rights issue have failed. Knowing how and where negotiations fail is essential if successful resolution is to be achieved. Muserref Yetim's important book seeks to illustrate a means to the peaceful resolution of natural resource based conflicts. Through a detailed study of the Tigris-Euphrates water conflict, involving Turkey, Syria and Iraq, countries of vital security interest to the world at large, the author clarifies the collective action dilemmas confronting Middle Eastern watercourses and reveals the bargaining bottlenecks where negotiations fail. She develops an original framework that explains bargaining failures and proposes conditions for creating a new property rights regime among watercourse states that offers a route to governing their shared water resources in ways that are politically, economically and environmentally sound. In almost all water scarce regions, international water resources are subject to intense unilateral exploitation in a highly competitive fashion. And as demand for freshwater continues to increase, through increasing urbanization and the continuing development of societies, so the issue of how such shared water resources can best be governed is becoming vitally important. Negotiating International Water Rights offers both a timely contribution to a matter of international concern and important insights into resource conflict in countries of vital security interest to the world at large.

This volume examines the state ideology of Assyria in the Early Neo-Assyrian period (934-745 BCE) focusing on how power relations between the Mesopotamian deities, the Assyrian king, and foreign lands are described and depicted. It undertakes a close reading of delimited royal inscriptions and iconography making use of postcolonial and gender theory, and addresses such topics as royal deification, “religious imperialism”, ethnicity and empire, and gendered imagery. The important contribution of this study lies especially in its identification of patterns of ideological continuity and variation within the reigns of individual rulers, between various localities, and between the different rulers of this period, and in its discussion of the place of Early Neo-Assyrian state ideology in the overall development of Assyrian propaganda. It includes several indexed appendices, which list all primary sources, present all divine and royal epithets, and provide all of the “royal visual representations,” and incorporates numerous illustrations, such as maps, plans, and royal iconography.

The purpose of this book is to give a connected account of what happened in the ancient Middle East, primarily on the basis of the records and monuments that have been recovered through the work of modem archaeology. The Middle East is defined as extending from the western border of Egypt (20 degrees E) to the eastern border of Iran (60 degrees E),

The rediscovery of Babylon and Assyria in the 1840s transformed Western views on the origins of civilisation. The excavation of Nineveh proved that even the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians together did not constitute the ancient world. These peoples had nothing to do with the beginnings of civilisation on Earth. It was in Mesopotamia that humanity took the first steps on its path towards the society we know today. The Sumerians inaugurated civilisation itself, but it was the Babylonians and then the Assyrians who fulfilled its potential. Their early experiments in state formation remain fascinating to us today: just like our governments, for a thousand years Babylon and Assyria grappled with the challenges of organising central power, administering distant territories, and engineering social harmony in empires and their cities. These achievements form one of the momentous episodes in human history; the Mesopotamian invention of writing revolutionised our minds and increased our intellectual possibilities a hundredfold. The First Great Powers is a revelation: of kingship, warfare, society and religion. Here at last we can discover what it meant to be an ancient Mesopotamian living in such an extraordinary world.

As the birthplace of three principal religions, the Middle East is holy to 15 million Jews, 2 billion Christians, and 1 billion Muslims. As the cradle of western civilization, it is fundamental to world history, the place where humans transformed themselves from nomadic hunters to settled farmers capable of building great cities and societies. This detailed history covers the Middle East from its ancient beginnings to the present. The confluence of events that produced civilized society is fully discussed, along with the establishment of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The emergence and decline of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, which laid much of the framework for the region to move into the modern era, is covered in depth. Analysis of the area in recent decades focuses on World War I and II and the regional conflicts that inflame the Middle East of the 21st century. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Snakes. Birds and Dreams: Gobekli Tepe and Caduceus By: Toru Nakamura PhD An international economist, Toru Nakamura, PhD has served in consulting and executive roles advising many private and public organizations around the world. Sharing a wide-ranging view is necessary to the future of our troubled world. However, too many social scientists have become increasingly specialized, paying little attention to what other disciplines are discovering and are losing a humanist perspective. In the process, they ignore the imagination and the importance of virtues like love or trust to bind us together. As the twenty-first century began, Dr. Nakamura began to visit some ruins of the world. He was awestruck at the prehistoric ruins called Göbekli Tepe, which was unearthed in the mid-1990s in southeastern Turkey. Later, Dr. Nakamura learned that the Greek symbol of the caduceus, a wand topped with wings and two entwined snakes, likely originated at this remarkable prehistoric site. There, as the last Ice Age was ending, the human imagination that led to the birth of civilization burst out.