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.

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

In addition to Eastern Armenian, many languages, such as Korean, Thai, Indo-Aryan languages, Dravidian languages, Icelandic, Ancient Greek, and the dialects of Chinese etc.

Category: Ancient Middle Eastern wisdom literature

Ancient Egyptian and Middle Eastern peoples also used honey for embalming the dead.

Scholars have noted that Song of Songs shows similarities of various kinds with other Ancient Near Eastern love poetry in general, but particularly some Sumerian erotic passages, and the Ramesside Egyptian love poetry.

Riegl traced formalistic continuity and development in decorative plant forms from Ancient Egyptian art and other ancient Near Eastern civilizations through the classical world to the Islamic arabesque ; while the Kunstwollen has few followers today, his basic analysis of the development of forms has been confirmed and refined by the wider corpus of examples known today.

Eastern Hemisphere in 476 CE, showing the Mauri kingdoms after the fall of Ancient Rome | Rome.

The Eurasian Avars or Ancient Avars () were a militarized Turkic equestrian group which established an empire spanning considerable areas of Central and Eastern Europe from the late 6th to the early 9th century.

Ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern sailors would frequently paint the symbol on the bow of their vessel to ensure safe sea travel.

Stiebing ( 1994 ) has " Land of the Lords of Brightness " ( William Stiebing, Ancient Near Eastern History and Culture ).

The personal table fork was most likely invented in the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire where they were in common use by the 4th century CE ( its origin may even go back to Ancient Greece, before the Roman period ).

In Ancient Eastern Asia, Chinese hegemony was present during the Spring and Autumn Period ( ca.

It also became clear that the " astralizing " ( association or identification with heavenly bodies ) of Ancient Near Eastern deities was a late ( Iron Age ) development in no way connected with the origin of religion as theorized by some 19th-century schools of thought.

Sacred prostitution has not been substantiated regarding any Ancient Near Eastern cultures, despite many popular descriptions of the habit.

The Lie Became Great: the forgery of Ancient Near Eastern cultures, 2000

In Eastern Orthodox Christian hymns and icons, the Ancient of Days is sometimes identified with God the Father ; but most properly, in accordance with Orthodox theology he is identified with God the Son, or Jesus Christ.

As such, Eastern Christian art will sometimes portray Jesus Christ as an old man, the Ancient of Days, to show symbolically that he existed from all eternity, and sometimes as a young man to portray him as he was incarnate.

Throughout this entire period both Assyria and Babylonia continued to exist as geo political entities and named regions, and Assyria in particular became a center of a distinctly Mesopotamian Christianity, namely the ancient Eastern Syrian Rite Christianity which was spread all over the near east and as far away as central Asia, India, Mongolia and China by travelling monks and still exists as the religion of the Assyrians to this day in the form of the Assyrian Church of the East, Chaldean Catholic Church and Ancient Church of the East.

In European manuscripts dating from the 13th century CE, " Ruthenia " is used to describe lands of the Ancient Rus, ie, parts of Eastern Europe.

The Carsten Niebuhr Institute of Ancient Eastern Studies ( u.

Their music and lyrics are inspired by Ancient Egyptian / Near Eastern mysticism, history, religion, and art, as well as stories by H. P. Lovecraft.

* ANET = Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 3rd ed.