but why did the Old Chinese postulate five elements, when the Ancient Near East -- which may have initiated the idea that natural elements exerted influence in human life and activities -- recognized only four??

Near Kayenta, Arizona, Jonathan Haas of the Field Museum in Chicago has been studying a group of Ancient Pueblo villages that relocated from the canyons to the high mesa tops during the late 13th century.

It has recently been suggested that the regional decline at the end of the Akkadian period ( and First Intermediary Period of the Ancient Egyptian Old Kingdom ) was associated with rapidly increasing aridity, and failing rainfall in the region of the Ancient Near East, caused by a global centennial-scale drought.

Category: Ancient Near East

* Van de Mieroop, Mark ( 2004 ): A History of the Ancient Near East, Oxford.

* Thespis: Ritual, Myth, and Drama in the Ancient Near East by Theodor Gaster.

At that time, Sloane's collection consisted of around 71, 000 objects of all kinds including some 40, 000 printed books, 7, 000 manuscripts, extensive natural history specimens including 337 volumes of dried plants, prints and drawings including those by Albrecht Dürer and antiquities from Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Ancient Near and Far East and the Americas.

The Ancient Near Eastern collection also had its beginnings in 1825 with the purchase of Assyrian and Babylonian antiquities from the widow of Claudius James Rich.

Formerly the Department of the Ancient Near East, with a collection numbering some 330, 000 works, the British Museum possesses by far the world's largest and most important collection of Mesopotamian antiquities outside Iraq.

File: Carved ivory depicting a woman at a window. jpg | Carved ivory object from the Nimrud Ivories, Phoenician, Nimrud, 9th-8th century BC ( the Nimrud Ivories are widely considered to be one of the Ancient Near East's greatest discoveries )

A total of twenty Ptolemaic constellations are directly continued from the Ancient Near East.

Parallels to the earliest Babylonian ( Sumerian ) star catalogues suggest that the ancient Chinese system did not arise independently from that of the Ancient Near East.

The association of the serpent with a monstrous opponent overcome by a heroic deity has its roots in the mythology of the Ancient Near East, including Canaanite ( Hebrew, Ugaritic ), Hittite and Mesopotamian.

This topos can be traced to the Chaoskampf of the mythology of the Ancient Near East ( e. g. Hadad vs. Yam, Marduk vs. Tiamat, Teshub vs. Illuyanka, etc.

He was a key figure in the Axial Age, the period from 800 BC to 200 BC, during which similarly revolutionary thinking appeared in China, India, Iran, the Near East, and Ancient Greece.

* Ancient Near East

In the Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts it is revealed the ancient Egyptians believed Nun ( the Ocean ) was a circular body surrounding nbwt ( a term meaning " dry lands " or " Islands ") and therefore believed in a similar Ancient Near Eastern circular earth cosmography surrounded by water.

While the term grimoire is originally European, and many Europeans throughout history, particularly ceremonial magicians and cunning folk, have made use of grimoires, the historian Owen Davies noted that similar such books can be found all across the world, ranging from Jamaica to Sumatra, and he also noted that the first such grimoires could be found not in Europe but in the Ancient Near East.

This Harifian culture may have adopted the use of pottery from the Isnan culture and Helwan culture of Egypt ( which lasted from 9000-4500 BC ), and subsequently fused with elements from the PPNB culture during the climatic crisis of 6000 BC to form what Juris Zarins calls the Syro-Arabian pastoral technocomplex, which saw the spread of the first Nomadic pastoralists in the Ancient Near East.

* Ancient Near East

* The History of the Ancient Near East

The religion of the Israelites of Iron Age I, like many Ancient Near Eastern religions, was based on the cult of the ancestors and the worship of family gods ( the " gods of the fathers ").

With the emergence of monarchy at the beginning of Iron Age II the king promoted his own family god, Yahweh, as the god of the kingdom, but beyond the royal court religion continued to be both polytheistic and family-centered, as it was also for other societies in the Ancient Near East.

* Ancient Near Eastern religion, Egyptian mythology

An abbot ( from Old English abbod, abbad, from Latin abbas (“ father ”), from Ancient Greek ἀββᾶς ( abbas ), from Aramaic ܐܒܐ / אבא (’ abbā, “ father ”); confer German Abt ; French abbé ) is the head and chief governor of a community of monks, called also in the East hegumen or archimandrite.

It has also been recently suggested that the rapid climatic collapse, marking the Akkadian Dark Age, may have been responsible for the religiously prescribed prohibition against the raising and consumption of pigs that spread through the Ancient Middle East from the end of the third millennium BC.

It was the formulation of Mary as the Theotokos which caused a schism with the Church of the East, now divided between the Assyrian Church of the East and the Ancient Church of the East, while the Chaldean Catholic Church entered into full communion with Rome in the 16th century.

The Atharvaveda, a sacred text of Hinduism dating from the Early Iron Age, is the first Indian text dealing with medicine, like the medicine of the Ancient Near East based on concepts of the exorcism of demons and magic.

Likewise, the Museum of the Ancient Orient, part of the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, also has a " Code of Hammurabi " clay tablet, dated to 1750 BC, in ( Room 5, Inv # Ni 2358 ).

Also, the eating of clay ( a form of geophagy ) has been documented in historical sources beginning with Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt.

Category: Ancient Near and Middle East clay objects

* Ancient Egypt begins using clay, bone and ivory tags to label boxes, possibly an example of proto-writing

Ancient references to pottery manufacturing can be found in the area, with soils rich in clay.

Like the Ancient Greeks, the Maya created clay slips from a mixture of clays and minerals.

The North African provinces spanned across regions rich with olive plantations and potters ' clay sources, which led to the early development of fine Ancient Roman pottery, especially African Red Slip terra sigillata tableware and clay oil lamp manufacture, as a crucial industry.

Ancient mugs were usually carved in wood or bone or shaped of clay, but most modern ones are made of ceramic materials such as earthenware, bone china, porcelain or stoneware.

Reliefs can be impressed by stamps onto clay, or the clay pressed into a mould bearing the design, as was usual with the mass-produced terra sigillata of Ancient Roman pottery.

Category: Ancient Near and Middle East clay objects

Ancient iron extraction site consisting of mines and three clay built furnaces.

Category: Ancient Near and Middle East clay objects

Category: Ancient Near and Middle East clay objects

Category: Ancient Near and Middle East clay objects