June 2016
Vol. 4, No. 6
Welcome to The Ancient Near East Today Vol. 4, No. 6! In this issue, we give you free access to the BASOR article about the Petra discovery that has made headlines, then take you from Oman to Wales to San Diego, with a stop to consider that most difficult language, Sumerian.
We continue to look at the heritage crisis in Syria with a report from ASOR’s Cultural Heritage Initiatives on its new partnership with UC San Diego’s Center for Cyber-Archaeology and Sustainability and the TerraWatchers web portal. Alessandra Avanzini takes a look at the important Iron Age site of Salut in Oman. Erika Mersal examines the history of Sumerology and its difficult decipherment. Katharina Zinn then examines the history of Egyptian objects in Welsh museums and what they mean for the Welsh people today.
As always, we encourage you to send The Ancient Near East Today articles to family and friends, post links to Facebook and Twitter, and to be in touch with the editor. Remember, being a  is free, so please spread the news!
Hiding in Plain Sight: The Discovery of a New Monumental Structure at Petra
By Sarah Parcak and Christopher A. Tuttle
This article describes the discovery and mapping of a large, previously unknown monumental structure at Petra, Jordan, using Google Earth, WorldView-1 and WorldView-2, and drones. Petra represents one of the most well-known and surveyed archaeological parks in the world; yet significant structures within range of its central city remain to be discovered.
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TerraWatchers, UCSD, and ASOR CHI Partner to Monitor Archaeological Sites
By: Stephen H. Savage, Michael Danti, and Thomas Levy
Warfare has been raging almost continuously across some part of the Middle East for more than forty years. It has gone hand-in-hand with social and political revolutions in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, destabilizing the entire region and encouraging widespread looting and destruction of archaeological sites, museums, and portable cultural heritage.
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Salut and the Future of Archaeology in Oman
By Alessandra Avazini
Interest in the archaeology of South East Arabia arose a little more than fifty years ago. The region – the gateway to the Indian Ocean – had previously been left at the margins of Ancient Near East’s history.
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A Brief History of Sumerology
By Erika Marsal
Sumerian is the language of ancient Sumer, that is, southern Mesopotamia, during the third millennium BCE. But what is Sumerian, really?
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Shaping Welsh Identity? – Egyptian Objects and Intangible Heritage
By Katharina Zinn
There is a dream of anyone working in a museum to find a forgotten object or even an overlooked collection. Amazingly this dream has come true for me, twice. But once the first excitement has settled, problems arise very rapidly.
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The Ancient Near East Today features contributions from diverse academics, a forum featuring debates of current developments from the field, and links to news and resources. The ANE Today covers the entire Near East, and each issue presents discussions ranging from the state of biblical archaeology to archaeology after the Arab Spring.