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* I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. Em. M. Tanret, Prof. K. De Graef, and the reviewers who read through and commented on this article. I am most grateful for the access the former provided to the Ghent University seal and prosopographical databases, and the VHS recordings of the Tell ed-Dēr archive (Di). Further, I would like to thank Mr. E. Smekens for drawing the seals with such great care for detail. The following abbreviations are used for the names of the Old Babylonian kings from Sippar: Bti = Buntaḫtun-ila; Im = Immerum; Sle = Sumu-lā-el; Sa = Sabium; AS = Apil-Sin; Sm = Sin-muballiṭ; Ḫa = Ḫammu-rabi; Si = Samsuiluna; Ae = Abi-esuḫ; Ad = Ammi-ditana; Aṣ = Ammi-ṣaduqa; Sd = Samsu-ditana. All absolute dates given follow the New Chronology from H. Gasche et al., Dating the Fall of Babylon. A Reappraisal of Second-Millennium Chronology, Mesopotamian History and Environment Series II, Memoirs 4 (Ghent, 1998). All text abbreviations cited follow either the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary or R. Pientka, Die spataltbabylonische Zeit (Munster, 1998); the series MHET = L. Dekiere, Old Babylonian Real Estate Documents from Sippar in the British Museum (Ghent, 1994–1998), vols. 1–6. 1 See the tables for references to the tablets on which the eighteen seal impressions are attested. 2 See the excellent study of D. Matthews, Principles of Composition in Near Eastern Glyptic of the Later Second Millennium B.C., Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis Series Archaeologica 8 (Freiburg, 1990): 27–54, who states that “the decorative and functional role of seals would be adequately provided by a system which specified of the recarved seal is rather remarkable by itself. Moreover, the seal was used by four different persons, i.e., two merchants and their respective sons, covering a period of at least eighty-five years. By considering this seal in its professional and familial context, it is possible to shed light on its iconography and use, and on the dual transmission of a title and a seal from father to son. The data presented are considered in the context of over 7,000 seal impressions dated to the Old Babylonian period and deriving from the ancient city of Sippar, and more than 56,000 names, assembled in a prosopographical database by the Assyriological staff of the Near East department of Ghent University.

As an epilogue to “Uber die vier Meister von Reims,” a study attempting to assert a new chronology for the four master builders of the cathedral at Reims published in 1927 in the Jahrbuch fur Kunstgeschichte, Erwin Panofskywrote a short theoretical text on the problem of historical time. These theoretical reflections were reprinted as “Zum Problem der historischen Zeit” in a collection of Panofsky’s German essays of the nineteen-tens and twenties published in 1980. More recently the entire study has been reprinted as part of a new collection containing all of Panofsky’s German writings. These theoretical reflections were never meant to stand alone and are actually an epilogue to the appendix in which he addresses the chronology of the sculpture adorning the cathedral. Panofsky developed this chronology in the process of trying to reconstruct the building history because he found it necessary to use the stylistic attributes of the sculpture and sculptural decoration and their position on the building to determine when certain architectural elements were put in place. In attempting to connect the stylistic development of the sculpture to the building history, Panofsky discovered that there were limitations to applying stylistic change in establishing chronology because the presence of disparate styles in the same period of time seemed to contradict the possibility of drawingparallels between stylistic and historical developments. This study was written at a time when Panofsky was working through the theoretical issues that would underlie the art historical methodology he would later develop in the United States after leaving Germany in 1933. For this rea

The traditional Iron Age chronology has recently been challenged by I. Finkelstein who proposed a wholesale lowering of its dates. The cornerstone of the new chronology is the seeming absence of Ph...

L'article s'interesse a la chronologie relative entre le monde egyptien (fin de la periode predynastique, debut de la periode dynastique) et l'empire Uruk. Des contacts entrent les deux civilisations sont mises en evidence par des transferts de technologies, de materiels et de sujets pour l'iconographie. Mais en aucun cas, la civilisation Uruk est a l'origine de la civilisation egyptienne.

It has long been assumed that Palestine experienced the same political and social disintegration in the third and fourth centuries C.E. as the Roman world in general. The growing realization, howev...

Professor David Harrison Stevens, in a recent article entitled "The Order of Milton's Sonnets, "' has worked out a new chronology for these pieces based primarily on the hypothesis that Milton himself intended to arrange them according to the time of their composition and that their order in the 1645 edition and their designated order in the Cambridge Manuscript may therefore be relied on for the determination of doubtful points. Proved disagreement between the Cambridge Manuscript and the edition of 1673 is held to strengthen the supposition that the departures from the chronological order in that volume did not have Milton's sanction. In reopening the question of chronology and in directing attention to the data afforded by the Cambridge Manuscript, Professor Stevens has rendered a necessary service to Milton scholarship. A review of his conclusions is made desirable by what appears to be unsoundness in some of his arguments and by the existence of evidence in addition to what has hitherto been brought forward. We may consider first the problem of the arrangement of the sonnets in the 1673 edition.