Abstract The war between Assyria and Egypt resulted in the deportation of scholars from Nile Valley to Mesopotamia. Among them were so-called “snake charmers.” While it was a well-known profession Egypt, this not case or Babylonia, where treatment snakebites scorpion stings left exorcist doctors. A number clues late Neo-Assyrian Achaemenid Persian periods suggest that charmers” enjoyed success ...

In this paper, I will give a detailed account of vowel harmony and vowel dissimilation in Yucatec Maya. These phenomena provide insights for the treatment of assimilation in Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993), as well as for the organisation of phonological features. The theoretical topics to be dealt with are (i.) an adequate formalisation of phonological feature assimilation within C...