Middle East

Firdausi's Shahnama (Book of Kings), completed in eastern Iran in around A.D. 1010, is a work of mythology, history, literature and propaganda: a living epic poem that pervades and expresses many aspects of Persian culture. Thousands of manuscript copies of the text, the earliest dating from 1217, exist in libraries throughout the world. Many hundreds of these are illustrated with miniature paintings, some of them among the most magnificent masterpieces of Persian art.

A primary aim of the project is to employ modern archaeological techniques to date this 195 km long baked brick wall and place it within its landscape context. Although ostensibly to protect the inhabited lands of NE Iran from the incursion of nomadic groups from the central Asian steppe, there is clearly more to this wall than meets the eye. Discoveries by our Iranian colleagues, now confirmed by fieldwork in 2005, demonstrate that the wall is associated with a massive system of water supply consisting of earthen dams and canals.

The project's mandate is to gather evidence for the use of Greek Bible translations by Jews in the Middle Ages, to edit and publish these remains, to subject them to linguistic analysis, and to compare them with other Greek biblical texts, earlier, contemporary and later. the corpus developed by the project comprises the exact remains of Jewish Greek Bible versions, edited from manuscripts. They include continuous texts, glossaries in Jewish sources, scholia, and marginalia in Christian manuscripts.

WF16 is located in the spectacular Wadi Faynan area of Southern Jordan. The excavation will use a single context recording system (based on the MoLAS system) and will use a purpose built archaeological database (supplied by IADS York) to create an easily accessible site archive. Material remains at the site indicate that settlement occurred during the Pre Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) period, with a suite of radiocarbon dates indicating occupation between 11,600 and 10,200 BP.