Ricerc@Sapienza

The article is a presentation of the recent trends in food history in near eastern studies, and covers the last ten years of researches, with different perspectives.

During the 7th campaign of the Italian-Iraqi archaeological team digging at the site of Abu Tbeirah (South-Western Iraq) , of which the two Authors share the responsibility of the direction, two bricks, inscribed with the so called ‘standard inscription’ of Amar-Suena (AS nr. 1), have been found. It is our pleasure to present them to the two Jubelees as a little token of our admiration for their immense scientific contribution to our knowledge of 3rd millennium BC Mesopotamian history.

Since 2012 seven excavation campaigns have been carried out at Abu Tbeirah, a 3rd mill. BC city located near Nasiriyah. The paper will present the results of the interdisciplinary researches carried out in these years and the discoveries in the excavated areas, that are shedding new light on the life of a 3rd mill. BC southern Mesopotamian city. Moreover, the preliminary results of the 2017 excavation of Abu Tbeirah harbor, a huge artificial basin surrounded by a rampart and linked to the main canal crossing the Tell, will be presented as well.

Since the 1990s, there has been an unceasing debate over computer semiotics as an autonomous discipline aimed at establishing the function of the logical operators of programming and computing. In fact, the structural and semantic encoding of the analytical object also comprise one of the main trends in Natural Computing (nc) and in the fast-moving field of computer science.

The encoding of the spatial-temporal archeological, historical and anthropological records can be considered an ideal-typical representation of the human reasoning and thus also an artificial membrane interposed between the researcher and the past. These membranes are here considered artificial networks and can undergo interrogation processes through the most advanced analytical tools for learning and modeling complex configurations.

Abstract - In Greater Mesopotamian societies, the ruling elites rooted their power on rural communities mainly through the control on raw material, among which staple food was one of the most important goods. Accumulation and redistribution of food, in ceremonial and administrative contexts, were basic factors for this process, which led to early state formation, and were essential political, social and economic instruments in the hands of the elites.

War in the Ancient Near East has been (and it still is) a preferred theme of research by scholars who have been analyzing the composition and formation of the armies, the way war was fought and therefore the different techniques and strategies of fighting.