More than half a century has now passed since R. P. Dougherty 's significant monograph was published in 1929, summarizing what was known up to then about Nabonidus and Belshazzar. ' Certain further pieces of information about these two historical figures have surfaced in the meantime, and the present seems like an appropriate juncture at which to review the evidence and examine the relationship...

Soils are delicate structures, and careless agricultural practices can destroy them. Crop decline resulting from increased soil salinity can be traced back thousands of years to Sumer and Babylonia. There, the original “Fertile Crescent” eventually turned into desert, destroyed by deforestation, unwise planting, and irrigation-induced soil salinity. Such decline in soil productivity also was ev...

he discovery, from the 1960s until the present, of a small corpus of about twenty texts concerning strings, tuning, and performance from ancient Iraq (loosely equivalent to “Mesopotamia”) and Syria has transformed our view of the earliest stages of music history. Not only is this corpus by far the earliest recorded expression of what might be called “music theory,” but these texts also belong t...