Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures

Purple-dyed textiles, primarily woolen, were much sought after in the Ancient Near East and the Mediterranean, and they adorned the powerful and wealthy. It is commonly a [...]

Reconstructing environments around archaeological sites is complicated by past land management practices and regional-scale climate proxies that can be contradictory and [...]

A Babylonian inscription found in western Iran is written in the name of an official of the Kassite king Šagarakti-Šuriaš (1245–1233 B.C.). It provides the first contempo [...]

Ancient Egyptian ontologies have been commonly approached as related to order and chaos. Associated with the latter are the concepts of existence and non-existence, wh [...]

This paper analyzes the plans and layouts of Chinese ceramic workshops from the Tang to Ming periods (seventh to seventeenth century AD) to understand how ceramic product [...]

This paper is the first comprehensive account of the male mummy portrait (also known as a "Fayum" or "Fayoum" portrait) in the Oriental Institute in Chicago. I identify t [...]

In the recent exhibition catalog Death Dogs: The Jackal Gods of Ancient Egypt by Terry Wilfong, there appeared as number thirty-two a papyrus inscrib [...]

Many ancient Egyptian papyrus manuscripts inscribed with funerary compositions contain annotations within the text and margins. Some of these annotations relate directly [...]

The funerary literature from ancient Egypt has long been studied. However, the final manuscripts in this tradition have received negligible attention. In the first two ce [...]