Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ancient Near East/Archive 6

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Coordinators' working group

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Aramaic language FAR

I have nominated Aramaic language for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. YellowMonkey (click here to vote for world cycling's #1 model!) 01:22, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

WikiProject Mesopotamia

I've made a proposal for WikiProject Mesopotamia because the area needs improving and properly organizing. All opinions needed and all support appreciated. Izzedine (talk) 08:49, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Hypotheses and theories for Etruscan origin

May I request some expert attention to this new article? It include items excluded from Etruscan civilization, including WP:SYNTHESIS, WP:OR and some dodgy-looking sources such as Bugge. Many thanks for any help with this, MuffledThud (talk) 18:58, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

I love this bit: "Dr. Bugge, a learned Norwegian, has developed a suggestion offered thirty years ago by the late Dr. Dr. Robert Ellis of London, that the Etruscan was an Armenian dialect." The linked Robert Ellis is still alive, and the Robert Ellis who wrote The Armenian Origin of the Etruscans is indeed very late, as he wrote it in 1841, which by my calculation is a bit more than thirty years ago."robert+ellis"+"armenian+origin+of+the+etruscans"&num=100. Bugge is presumably Sophus Bugge "armenian+origin+of+the+etruscans"+Sophus+Bugge&num=100 - apparently 1890. The creator of this new article just did a copy and paste of an old one on the Armenian origin idea. But if it all dates to the 19th century, I'd be tempted to either ignore it or simply make it clear what an old idea it is. Dougweller (talk) 20:01, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

WP:NOT#PLOT

Apologies for the notice, but this is being posted to every WikiProject to avoid accusations of systemic bias. Hiding T 13:22, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

GA Sweeps invitation

This message is being sent to WikiProjects with GAs under their scope. Since August 2007, WikiProject Good Articles has been participating in GA sweeps. The process helps to ensure that articles that have passed a nomination before that date meet the GA criteria. After nearly two years, the running total has just passed the 50% mark. In order to expediate the reviewing, several changes have been made to the process. A new worklist has been created, detailing which articles are left to review. Instead of reviewing by topic, editors can consider picking and choosing whichever articles they are interested in.

We are always looking for new members to assist with reviewing the remaining articles, and since this project has GAs under its scope, it would be beneficial if any of its members could review a few articles (perhaps your project's articles). Your project's members are likely to be more knowledgeable about your topic GAs then an outside reviewer. As a result, reviewing your project's articles would improve the quality of the review in ensuring that the article meets your project's concerns on sourcing, content, and guidelines. However, members can also review any other article in the worklist to ensure it meets the GA criteria.

If any members are interested, please visit the GA sweeps page for further details and instructions in initiating a review. If you'd like to join the process, please add your name to the running total page. In addition, for every member that reviews 100 articles from the worklist or has a significant impact on the process, s/he will get an award when they reach that threshold. With ~1,300 articles left to review, we would appreciate any editors that could contribute in helping to uphold the quality of GAs. If you have any questions about the process, reviewing, or need help with a particular article, please contact me or OhanaUnited and we'll be happy to help. --Happy editing! Nehrams2020 (talk • contrib) 22:04, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Burney Relief

Major rewrite, would appreciate some feedback ... rating? Thanks! Enki H. (talk) 06:31, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Essentially the same as my post on Wikipedia Help Desk

I thought this might be better venue to voice my "inklings": Hebat, and other unsourced speculative articles

Should i delete 99 percent of article, or propose it for deletion or propose it for merging with Hurrian mythology or what? I sense there is the nub of a good article here and wonder if the main author, possibly a guy named Christopher Siren, just needs a fire lit under him to get him to provide sources and then Hebat could be a fine article.--But I also have been getting a horible feeling that ancient mythology and ancient civilizations on wikioedia are getting screwed so gigantically we will soon be a worse laughingstock in libraries everywhere, with no credibility--I sense that a number of contributors with a knack for storytelling have been writing fairy tales in ancient Sumer, ancient history, and mythology, and no one is calling them on it. Well it's pretty late and im rambling but I hope someone will take my intuition seriously.Rich (talk) 08:27, 12 June 2009 (UTC)Rich (talk) 08:40, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

It's not just Sumer. It wouldn't be deleted in an AfD as there is clearly a Hurrian goddess Hebat and an article is possible. I'm pretty sure Chris didn't write it. My son has the book I really need, I must get it from him. Meanwhile there are a couple of useful sources on Google books that are not just snippets, I'll see what I can do. Dougweller (talk) 09:52, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks!75.45.106.99 (talk) 17:00, 12 June 2009 (UTC)Rich (talk) 18:02, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

After thinking about it, I want to clarify that I think Hebat may be speculative, and is unsourced but is certainly not the bullshit I'm really worried about. I do advocate a stronger push to get Hebat and similar articles sourced (maybe even by threats to delete them!!)because it's hard to weed out the really bad stuff just by our bullshit detectors, we need to demand sources for every article in ancient civilizations. I realize this may seem over drastic but I don't think it is. The stuff below is what has put a bee in my bonnet:

• "More than 5,000 years ago the first empire in the world was founded by the King of Kish.[citation needed] While the name of that king is lost to history along with most of the history of his empire, the imposing title remains.[citation needed] Ever since that time every emperor to conquer the area known as Sumer, in present-day Iraq, from the Sargon, who overthrew Kish and established the Akkadian Empire, to Saddam Hussein has taken the title of King of Kish.[citation needed] In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh despite all his power is a vassal of the King of Kish.[citation needed] While he makes an attempt to display that he could be independent, by defying Kish's authority, his display is brief and in the end he comes back and pledges his fealty. [citation needed]Indeed, some scholars[citation needed] believe that both the ancient Sumerian and the Biblical flood stories arise from one of the greatest floods in history, the flood that destroyed Kish near the height of its power...[citation needed]while Kish recovered somewhat and had kings again this destruction enabled other empires to form.[citation needed] From what little we know of the Empire of Kish it appears to have operated a fairly centralized bureaucracy to run a system of tithe and tax that primarily dealt in agricultural goods and animals.[citation needed] The structure of Kishite bureaucracy and government can in some way be reconstructed from Akkadian practices,[citation needed] as the Akkadian kings copied much from the leaders of Kish[citation needed] who in turn preserved a great deal from the earlier days of the Empire. We can tell this because of the physical structures that have been excavated.[citation needed] Excavation of large buildings that appear to have been central storage facilities with attached office rooms for bureaucrats have told us much about both Kishite architecture and about the purposes that architecture may have served before it was buried in the great flood[citation needed] that practically leveled the city and ended its glory days"

Pretty obvious huh? But why couldn't whoever have did this gotten better at bsing and studied up and redirected his fairy tales to people above the ninth grade level? He seems to enjoy shoveling it, so unless he died he's still doing it somewhere.(There was another example on Meluhha, I think.So I'm saying as protection we need to clamp down on unsourced stuff. Best wishes, Rich (talk) 18:02, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Where did you find the above? Dougweller (talk) 18:09, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

It's from an old version of Kish that I deleted. See the Kish talk page, someone saved this version there.Rich (talk) 18:11, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Here's another example of suspect writing from Indus Valley Civilization, an old version. It's the example I mistakednly referred to above as from Meluhha:

• "Indus civilization agriculture must have been highly productive; after all, it was capable of generating surpluses sufficient to support tens of thousands of urban residents who were not primarily engaged in agriculture. It relied on the considerable technological achievements of the pre-Harappan culture, including the plough. Still, very little is known about the farmers who supported the cities or their agricultural methods. Some of them undoubtedly made use of the fertile alluvial soil left by rivers after the flood season, but this simple method of agriculture is not thought to be productive enough to support cities. There is no evidence of irrigation, but such evidence could have been obliterated by repeated, catastrophic floods.[citations needed]

The Indus civilization appears to contradict the hydraulic despotism hypothesis of the origin of urban civilization and the state. According to this hypothesis, all early, large-scale civilizations arose as a by-product of irrigation systems capable of generating massive agricultural surpluses.[citations needed]

It is often assumed that intensive agricultural production requires dams and canals. This assumption is easily refuted. Throughout Asia, rice farmers produce significant agricultural surpluses from terraced, hillside rice paddies, which result not from slavery but rather the accumulated labor of many generations of people. Instead of building canals, Indus civilization people may have built water diversion schemes, which—like terrace agriculture—can be elaborated by generations of small-scale labor investments. Such canals have, however, been found in northwestern India (Francfort). It should be noted that in only the easternmost section of the Indus Civilisation, people could build their lives around the monsoon, a weather pattern in which the bulk of a year's rainfall occurs in a four-month period; others had to depend on the seasonal flooding of rivers caused by snow melt at high elevations.[citations needed]

They domesticated animals like cattle, bears, wild pigs, dogs, water buffalo, elephants, monkeys, dromedary, chickens, goats, cats, and sheep."75.45.106.99 (talk) 19:07, 12 June 2009 (UTC)Rich (talk) 19:09, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Ancient Near East cleanup listing is huge.

The cleanup listing here, Wikipedia:WikiProject Ancient Near East/Cleanup listing, contains a long cleanup listing with many articles far remote from ancient times, and far remote from the Near East, for that matter.

What I am seeing on the cleanup page looks very much to me like a Wikipedia software bug. I made a screen capture of the statistics on a section called "About this listing" which says in part, "Based on that data, 855 articles are assigned to this work group, of which 113416, or 13,265.0% are flagged for cleanup." The next pages do list an incredible number of articles, on every possible subject, through missing coordinates in Zimbabwe at the end. Someone should report this software bug to the appropriate authorities. I don’t know who that might be. --DThomsen8 (talk) 23:46, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Wow, you're right. It was working last time I looked at it. I'll poke the

guy who maintains the Bot that generates the cleanup list. I wonder if the

other wiki cleanup lists are screwed up too.Ploversegg (talk) 00:23, 13 June 2009 (UTC)ploversegg

Funny convergence - I just alerted the bot author, seems to be a bug in the bot, author is following up. (see User_talk:B._Wolterding/Cleanup_listings#WP_Ancient_Near_East_-_statistics_broken) :-) Enki H. (talk) 03:05, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Fixed by the bot author who comments: [...] This was an error in the bot code, and not related to the category scheme. Nevertheless there is something strange about your category scheme, as Category:WikiProject Ancient Near East articles contains article pages, not talk pages (the bot expects the talk pages in the category). I changed your subscription so that the bot looks for the banner template rather than category members; this now seems to work fine. --B. Wolterding (talk) 14:43, 13 June 2009 (UTC) -- Enki H. (talk) 15:18, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Babylonian astrology needs your help

Don't know how interested you guys are in monitoring Babylonian astrology (it is part of this project), but it seems to contain a fair amount of neologisms, un-cited material, etc. -- 201.37.230.43 (talk) 12:21, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Category overlap?

Hi guys! Discussing with a few friends about transcription standards of Sumerian vs. Akkadian words, phrases and terms, I found the two categories Category:Sumerogram, pointing to Sumerogram and Category:Sumerian words and phrases.

1. Do we need both?

2. If both are needed, then could we erect a taxonomy like Category:Sumerogram is a specific case of Category:Sumerian words and phrases?

... said: Rursus (^mbork³) 07:17, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Naming of sites

Hi, I am interested in participating in the ANE portal, and I have already have a question that I could not find in the talk archive. If it has come up elsewhere, or if this is the wrong place, then I apologize, but anyway here it is: I am currently writing a page for Tell Hamidiya in Syria, and I found that a page on Tell Hamidiya (variant spelling) already exists but redirects to Taite, where it is said that Taite/Taidu has been identified with Hamidiya. As far as I know, that identification is still uncertain, so I wouldn't put that in this way on Wikipedia. I would still like to create Tell Hamidiya as a separate page, and then mention there that Taidu may be its ancient name, but that this is still uncertain. Any suggestions on this? I am quite happy to move my work to the Taite/Taidu page, but then we run into the following problem:

Anyway, the more important problem is that there seems to be no guidelines or consensus on Wikipedia for naming a page after a site's historical name or its current name. For example, Tell Brak redirects to Nagar, whereas the page of Tell Leilan is named, well, Tell Leilan.

I would argue for using the current name, as the historical name of a site is usually only signifant in a specific historical period. For example, Brak was known as Nagar during the third and second millennia, but its name during the fourth millennium is of course unknown. More problematic is the fact that sites may have had multiple names, as with Leilan (Shekhna/Shubat-Enlil). In that case, there would be no objective reason to choose for either of these names, and adopting the current name would be the best choice. Does anyone have any ideas on this? Zoeperkoe (talk) 19:18, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

bot request

Hi,

I've asked for someone with a bot to transfer Category:WikiProject Ancient Near East articles from articles and categories to the respective article talk pages and category talk pages. Every other WikiProject category system uses talk pages, and I think this is the proper way to do it. That is, I think it is inappropriate to put these WikiProject categories into the mainspace.

Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 51#Category:WikiProject Ancient Near East articles

Hesperian 00:03, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Hmm, that is a problem. But thanks a bunch for noticing this and taking the initiative in order to fix this. Happy editing! Laurinavicius (talk) 20:58, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

It turns out that these articles and categories were being categorised by the portal template. Someone has now altered the template so that it doesn't wrongly categorise these articles and categories. It turns out that your talk pages were categorised all along; I didn't notice because they were dispersed into assessment categories. So the problem is solved. Hesperian 00:25, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

That's odd, but at least everything's fine and working as it should be. Thanks for all of your help. My regards, Laurinavicius (talk) 19:53, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Persian Empire

Please note that there is an editwar occuring at Persian Empire, with content shifting from being a 60k article, a redirect, or a disambiguation page. Previous to the 2 month long edit war, the article was a 60k article. As this article appears to be within the scope of your wikiproject, I thought I'd let you know.

76.66.197.30 (talk) 00:24, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for letting us know. I've already taken a glance at what's going on there, but I don't really see an "edit war". To me, it actually seems like an orderly and proper proposal for a title change and page move, rather than an edit war. I'll post my opinon on this proposal relatively soon, once I gather more information on the topic, and, hopefully, other editors will do the same. My regards, Laurinavicius (talk) 17:21, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

If it were a page move, the size of the article wouldn't fluctuate, the name of the article would change, unless it were contavening WP:C&P... Unless you're looking at the wrong page? Talk:Persian Empire vs Talk:Achaemenid Empire ( Persian Empire (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) vs Achaemenid Empire (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) ) 76.66.197.30 (talk) 08:54, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes, you're right, I was looking at the wrong page. For some reason "Persian Empire" re-directed me to "Achaemenid Empire", so I got a bit confuzzled over that. Thanks again! My regards, Laurinavicius (talk) 20:44, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Problem with References RE Kramer

I believe that the main reference point for several articles, notably Kramer's History Begins at Sumer, seems to be heavily biased in it's comparisons to Christianity, without recognising the important differences between the religions. This will no doubt colour the wikipedia articles. Notable examples are the article on the Code of Ur-Nammu, where he arranges the Priest above the Godhead. It's a pretty big change but it seems of paramount importance that when we examine one of, if not the, earliest religion known to civilization that we study it from as objective a viewpoint as possible. Desdinova (talk) 15:39, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

Phoenician vs Egyptian

I wonder if somebody can help with this. This is the Empress Theatre (Montreal). Is it Phonenician or Egyptian style:

Thanks, Anna Frodesiak (talk) 04:40, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

I would say that building is Egyptian style, due to the sandstone-colored stone of the building; the images of what appears to be Osiris anointing a Pharoah, and those of a Pharoah in a royal headdress; and the columns, which were a fixture of Egyptian style (as it was influenced by Greek architecture, which relied heavily on the column). Hope this helps! Laurinavicius (talk) 03:16, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Very helpful. Thank you kindly. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 09:59, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Need help/advise...

The article Bethsaida has a link to et-Tell. The problem is that from the descriptions of the two sites they are two widely different locations, and this seems to be born out by the geo-coordinates given. I would edit-out the link myself except I'd like my conclusions double checked by experts (well... more expert than myself, anyway) - especially if there is more than one site named "et-Tell" {another problem, given its meaning :p} Thank you, Shir-El too 09:43, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

You're quite right, these are two very different places with the same name. Poliocretes (talk) 10:25, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

WP 1.0 bot announcement

This message is being sent to each WikiProject that participates in the WP 1.0 assessment system. On Saturday, January 23, 2010, the WP 1.0 bot will be upgraded. Your project does not need to take any action, but the appearance of your project's summary table will change. The upgrade will make many new, optional features available to all WikiProjects. Additional information is available at the WP 1.0 project homepage. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:33, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel

I just posted here: Talk:Nebuchadnezzar_II#Doubtful_statements_in_the_Bible_section; some reservations I have about statements in the article on Nebuchadnezzar II. History is really not my specialty, so it would be good if someone with a more helpful background would take a look at it. Thanks. --Art Carlson (talk) 10:11, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

AfD nomination of Ancient Arabic units of measurement

An article that you have been involved in editing, Ancient Arabic units of measurement, has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ancient Arabic units of measurement. Thank you.

Please contact me if you're unsure why you received this message. Jeepday (talk) 15:08, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Ancient Near East articles have been selected for the Wikipedia 0.8 release

Version 0.8 is a collection of Wikipedia articles selected by the Wikipedia 1.0 team for offline release on USB key, DVD and mobile phone. Articles were selected based on their assessed importance and quality, then article versions (revisionIDs) were chosen for trustworthiness (freedom from vandalism) using an adaptation of the WikiTrust algorithm.

We would like to ask you to review the Ancient Near East articles and revisionIDs we have chosen. Selected articles are marked with a diamond symbol (♦) to the right of each article, and this symbol links to the selected version of each article. If you believe we have included or excluded articles inappropriately, please contact us at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.8 with the details. You may wish to look at your WikiProject's articles with cleanup tags and try to improve any that need work; if you do, please give us the new revisionID at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.8. We would like to complete this consultation period by midnight UTC on Monday, October 11th.

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For the Wikipedia 1.0 editorial team, SelectionBot 00:09, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

WikiProject cleanup listing

I have created together with Smallman12q a toolserver tool that shows a weekly-updated list of cleanup categories for WikiProjects, that can be used as a replacement for WolterBot and this WikiProject is among those that are already included (because it is a member of Category:WolterBot cleanup listing subscriptions). See the tool's wiki page, this project's listing in one big table or by categories and the index of WikiProjects. Svick (talk) 19:53, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

Merge Mesopotamia - History of Mesopotamia - History of Sumer

Please see discussion here. -- Zoeperkoe (talk) 00:19, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

GAR Akkadian Empire

An article that you have been involved in editing, Akkadian Empire has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments good article reassessment page . If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status will be removed from the article. -- Zoeperkoe (talk) 22:44, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Delete/merge proposal combined Assyria-Babylonia articles

There are still some old articles with text largely based on the 1911 Britannica on "Babylonia and Assyria". Given that these texts are highly outdated, in most cases dealt with in more detail elsewhere (usually the articles on Babylonia and Assyria, and that "Babylonia and Assyria" does in no way represent a useful entity to discuss things like religion or geography, I suggest that they are merged with other articles, or, probably more likely, are simply deleted. The articles in question are:

• Geography of Babylonia and Assyria --> simply delete and turn into redirect, or merge into Mesopotamia and/or Assyria and Babylonia.
• Babylonia and Assyria --> simply delete and turn into redirect, or merge into Mesopotamia and/or Assyria and Babylonia.
• Assyro-Babylonian religion --> merge into Mesopotamian mythology.
• Assyro-Babylonian literature --> not sure what to do. Suggestions? Rename to Akkadian literature?

Any comments? -- Zoeperkoe (talk) 17:25, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

Your reasoning seems sound on all these points, so I'd support all the above merge proposals. If there is any text worth merging, it's better to merge and redirect than just to delete, of course. But yes, this is long overdue. Til Eulenspiegel (talk) 18:31, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

Sure, there might be one or two things worth keeping. Any ideas on Assyro-Babylonian literature? Akkadian literature is a redirect, and we can move Assyro-Babylonian literature there and together with Sumerian literature would probably give more complete coverage of Mesopotamia.--Zoeperkoe (talk) 18:53, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

 Done Consider all these moves done.--Zoeperkoe (talk) 02:43, 26 October 2011 (UTC)

Article rename discussion for Jerusalem during the Persian, Hellenic and early Roman Periods

The article Jerusalem during the Second Temple period was recently renamed to Jerusalem during the Persian, Hellenic and early Roman Periods. There is an ongoing discussion regarding the proposal to rename it back to its original title. This article is listed as part of this WikiProject, and comments may be left at Talk:Jerusalem during the Persian, Hellenic and early Roman Periods#Requested move. • Astynax ^talk 19:06, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

Khirbet Kerak / Bet Yerah / Al Sinnabra

The article Al-Sinnabra has been proposed for merger with Khirbet Kerak (Discuss). Your viewpoints would be quite appropriate here. --Sreifa (talk) 05:26, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

FAR Sargon of Akkad

I have nominated Sargon of Akkad for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here.--Zoeperkoe (talk) 03:59, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Portal:History

Is up for FPOC. This is one of the highest (if not the highest) visibility portal on Wikipedia, I recommend commenting on it! Cheers, ResMar 23:12, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

Namshub (incantation)

The Namshub (incantation) article is unsourced, yet makes big claims. It either needs source citations, or to be proposed for deletion. Is anyone here qualified to tell which of these two choices might be the right one? -- The Anome (talk) 19:57, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

Baʿal: Move discussion

FYI, a discussion is taking place here about moving the Baʿal article to Baal. Thank you. Yazan (talk) 17:32, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

CanaaniteRelief.jpg

image:CanaaniteRelief.jpg has been nominated for deletion -- 76.65.128.222 (talk) 05:49, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

Is this project alive?

I just wonder as Talk page seems deathly quiet. I just noticed that Wikipedia:WikiProject Ancient Near East/Article alerts isn't activated. In ictu oculi (talk) 02:46, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

CfDs

See my three CfDs related to Israel/Palestine historical cats at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2014 February 9. trespassers william (talk) 21:52, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

Followups

• Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2014 April 1#4th Century in Israel.
• Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2014 April 1#Category:Holy Land during Byzantine rule.

I support both, the idea is to replace the use of modern or religious place names with the contemporary name "Byzantine Empire" or a part of which. Of course it is being opposed by religious or nationalistic indignants. trespassers william (talk) 20:47, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Comment on the WikiProject X proposal

Hello there! As you may already know, most WikiProjects here on Wikipedia struggle to stay active after they've been founded. I believe there is a lot of potential for WikiProjects to facilitate collaboration across subject areas, so I have submitted a grant proposal with the Wikimedia Foundation for the "WikiProject X" project. WikiProject X will study what makes WikiProjects succeed in retaining editors and then design a prototype WikiProject system that will recruit contributors to WikiProjects and help them run effectively. Please review the proposal here and leave feedback. If you have any questions, you can ask on the proposal page or leave a message on my talk page. Thank you for your time! (Also, sorry about the posting mistake earlier. If someone already moved my message to the talk page, feel free to remove this posting.) Harej (talk) 22:47, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

WikiProject X is live!

Hello everyone!

You may have received a message from me earlier asking you to comment on my WikiProject X proposal. The good news is that WikiProject X is now live! In our first phase, we are focusing on research. At this time, we are looking for people to share their experiences with WikiProjects: good, bad, or neutral. We are also looking for WikiProjects that may be interested in trying out new tools and layouts that will make participating easier and projects easier to maintain. If you or your WikiProject are interested, check us out! Note that this is an opt-in program; no WikiProject will be required to change anything against its wishes. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you!

Note: To receive additional notifications about WikiProject X on this talk page, please add this page to Wikipedia:WikiProject X/Newsletter. Otherwise, this will be the last notification sent about WikiProject X.

Harej (talk) 16:56, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Unreferenced living people articles bot

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Kharsag

If anyone can rescue this I'd be happy, otherwise I think I'll merge it with Christian O'Brien as per the AfD on another take on this subject, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Kharsag Epics. Thanks. Dougweller (talk) 20:41, 29 March 2010 (UTC)

Capitalisation of ancient

In an attempt to get a project wide consensus and WP:MOS standard I've started a discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style_(capital_letters)#Capitalis(z)ation_of_ancient - eg the correct form of "Pottery of A/ancient Assyria". Please contribute if possible.77.86.119.83 (talk) 21:41, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Namtar

The page on Namtar suggests that the Sumerians were 'conquered' by the babylonians and Assyrians. This completely incorrect - in actuality there was a long and protracted period of cultural blending. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.98.15.61 (talk) 00:33, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Bronze age articles

I've been asked about these: "Those articles can be described in one simple word - DISASTER! :( First, there are many factual errors. Second, there is no any consensus about chronology; some Wikipedians use long chronoglogy, some middle, and some short, so there is complete chronological mess -dates can varry +/- 120 years! Third, there is category problem also; I saw very useless (& nonexisting) categories for ancient empires (example: Akkadian Empire) like "2200 BC disestablishments" - schoolars are not agreed did that empire collapsed in 23th or 22th century, so even something like "22th century BC disestablishments" wouldn't be enough precise. In any case, first point is typical while third point is easy, but for "long/middle/short chronology problem" you should organize some serious "Wiki aministrators discussion" and find some agreement. I also noticed that many foreign languages Wikis copied wrong & contradict dates so problem is even deeper..." Obviously this isn't an administrator's job, but it is a problem. We've done some cleanup on chronology on AE articles. Dougweller (talk) 17:35, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Yes 1)there are some bogus caregories in the ANE. I managed to stamp out the useless "destroyed cites" but more remain and 2) a lot of chrono work needs to be done. I have been using Short chronology timeline as a basic guide (which is based on Chronology of the ancient Near East) for any articles I written or worked on. While the short chronology is not the final answer in the ANE, it does have a lot of support and it seems better to have everybody using the same timeline, even if it does need to be adjusted someday if they dig up some tablet or other. Clearly some discussion may be required on this.Ploversegg (talk) 04:14, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

My suggestion is compulsory using acronyms like SC, MC or LC for short, middle or long chronology respectively after absolutely ever year, otherwise it would always be a complete mess. I found useless categories on this links also:

• Urartu
• Hittites
• States and territories established in 297 BC (cat)

Don't think only Wikipedia has chronological problems, I also found it on reputable academic encyclopedias like Iranica, example is begin of Epartid Elamite dynasty / end of Third dynasty of Ur:

• This article says "2004 B.C.E." (according middle chronology)
• This article says "1,940 B.C." (according short chronology)

Note: Dating differences between short, middle or long chronology are 0/-64/-120 years.

--93.143.56.206 (talk) 15:42, 5 July 2010 (UTC)(Orijentolog)

As far as support for chronologies; although problems are acknowledged, the MC is, at least in Mesopotamia/Turkey/Syria, still the most widely accepted chronology (at least for the Early/Middle Bronze Age, that is, the 3rd-early 2nd mill.). For that reason, I found the choice of Wikipedia for the SC as mentioned by Ploversegg a little bit strange, although I agree it is better to have uniformity throughout, even if the chronology eventually will have to be modified.

Recent research suggests that the MC might have to be shortened a little bit, but even so it would still be closer to MC than to SC. Given that the MC has been the longest and most widely accepted chronology so far anyway, I would suggest that, for purposes of Wikipedia, sticking to the MC would be best, as discussions about SC/MC/LC are highly technical and probably go beyond what most readers want to know if they lookup an ANE article.

One problem with chronologies is that different excavations often use different chronologies. If the dates from their publications are used, the use of different chronologies cannot be avoided, because converting them would mean original research which is not allowed on Wikipedia (unless, of course, a general review on chronologies of many sites is available).

Otherwise, I agree that many Bronze Age articles are in a terrible shape, although this seems to apply to many ANE articles in general, unfortunately. Zoeperkoe (talk) 16:51, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Agreed, using a uniform dating system is much more important than which one used. Besides, a lot of people are skeptical about the entire Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa reference point, but without it we would have a zillion chronologies instead of just 3-ish. So I'm happy with whatever. Another thing that needs to happen in the ANE is the consolidation and deletion of a number of small articles that have crept in over the years. And changing the official project definition of ANE to not include Egypt, which is happened in practice already, and uncating the remaining Egypt specific articles. You can get more indication of what needs to be done from the cleanup list, which I stuck on the project page Wikipedia:WikiProject Ancient Near East/Cleanup listing. Ploversegg (talk) 23:38, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Hi Ploversegg, the problem with Mesopotamian historical chronology (and biblical chronology as well) is that so far they have relied way too much on astronomical dates and kinglists, arguing that these are far more precise than radiometric dates. As a result, both Mesopotamia and especially the Levant have an incredible lack of radiocarbon dates compared to, say, western Europe or the American southwest. Now that finally large-scale radiocarbon dating programmes are being set up for the Levant and Mesopotamia (in this case, especially NE Syria), it's becoming clear that the previous chronologies are not as sound as thought until now (which has resulted in extremely heated debates in especially biblical archaeology, where +/- a few years can have quite an impact on people's believes). For that reason, I have been, and continue to be, very skeptical about the reliance on king lists and astronomical dates (especially toward the earlier part of the historical periods, with which I am most familiar). I prefer radiocarbon dates, and these suggest (at least for Syria/SE Turkey/Mesopotamia) something that is closest to the MC, and ruling out the LC entirely.

Similarly, in recent years chronological systems have been adopted in (NE)Syria that do not use historical terms like Ur III and Akkadian, simply because these are either not adequate to describe what happens in Syria (ie Ur III), or because they cannot be defined archaeologically (ie Akkadian; and it has been said that if it hadn't been for the texts, we would not have known that something like an Akkadian 'empire' ever existed). However, nothing of these new developments is reflected here on Wikipedia.

Removing Egypt from the coverage of ANE might be a good idea for the scope of the Wikipedia project, but historically Egypt simply does belong to the ANE, so you might expect a heated debate about this topic.

As regards working on a grand ANE revision (as that is what you seem to be arguing for), I am not sure whether I would like to be involved in that as the sort of leading editor. I like to think that I might be qualified to work on such a revision (the main problem of many ANE articles seems to be that they are written by people who are interested in the region but who do not have access to the scientific literature), but I don't like to get involved in the kind of debate that will certainly start over this. And I have a short list of articles that I want to finish first before I turn to any other topics. Anyway, I'll have a look at the cleanup list and see what needs to be done, maybe I can 'adopt' some of these articles as well. Zoeperkoe (talk) 15:44, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

I'm comfortable with everything you said. King lists are soft except in streches where you have good year names. I still have some hopes for dendrochronology. And there is some current skewing of the excavation related chrono data because work has continued in Syria and Turkey while largely at a standstill in Iraq and Iran, but hopefully that will change in time. So, I'm good ... as long as everyone agrees that the Minoan eruption was in 1627 BC. :-) Ploversegg (talk) 17:01, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

I just had a better look at some of the articles involved (which I intentionally avoided so far because they are just too messy), but I am really, really shocked. There is no mentioning whatsoever of any prehistoric periods; Ancient Near East says it starts with the Chalcolithic period. Why? Is anything before that not ancient enough? Is there anything in the word 'ancient' that limits it to (proto)historical periods? And why does the article Chronology of the Ancient Near East start with saying that it only covers the 3rd/2nd millennia? That's not even consistent with the definition of ANE on wikipedia. If this article wants to live up to its name, it has to cover anything from the Palaeolithic up to Alexander's conquest (and in fact even that date is becoming increasingly blurry). At least, that's the time period that's usually covered under the term ANE. I really don't get this, but it probably comes from the bias of most wikipedia contributors toward historical periods. Anyway, sorry for the tone; I just had to blow off some steam about these articles, I guess ;-)

Anyway, subjects such as these have so far-reaching implications that so far I have stayed away from editing them, because there's probably always going to be someone who disagrees, and I am not at wikipedia to fight about stuff; I am here to write nice articles and learn something in the process. Zoeperkoe (talk) 17:48, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

Agreed, doing Wikipedia is meant to be fun and a framework to learn. I have put a certain amount of "pre-historic" stuff in. Like I am poking on Chogha Mish as part of linking it to Cities of the ancient Near East (a misnomer that should be "Sites of the ANE" but what the heck).Ploversegg (talk) 20:59, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

Tiamat

...see Talk:Tiamat#Robert_Graves_and_matriarchy.2Fpatriarchy_analogy - I think this article might benefit from some out-of-universe scholarly material, if anyone is familiar with the topic. Casliber (talk · contribs) 01:15, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

Kingdom of Sam'al

Okease have a lok at this article. It is the translation of hu:Szamal (állam). Can somebodyhelp me to improve the form of the article? --Ksanyi (talk) 06:02, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Hi Ksanyi, I placed some comments on the talk page to help you improve the article. As for the suggestion to merge it with Sam'al, maybe someone else can comment on that as well? -- Zoeperkoe (talk) 14:02, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Middle vs Low chronology

The project seems to have adopted the Low Chronology, but there does not seem to have been any discussion about this (I find the "citation needed" tag on 'The absolute 2nd millennium BC dates resulting from this decision currently have a majority (though not unanimous) support in academia, although the middle chronology (reign of Hammurabi 1792 BC – 1750 BC) is commonly encountered in older literature'<ref>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_chronology</ref> and the fact that this statement: 'The current scholarly consensus is with the short chronology (sack of Babylon 1531 BC) used in this article.'<ref>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_ancient_Near_East</ref> is also unsourced rather telling).

To shed some light on middle vs low and their respective degree of acceptance, I have collected some quotes for that from recent handbooks of both historians and archaeologists, which are the kind of books that Wikipedia should follow.

• D.T.Potts 1999: The archaeology of Elam, p. xxix, 'Absolute dates when cited for individual Mesopotamian rulers conform to the so-called 'Middle Chronology' and follow Brinkman 1977.'
• P.M.M.G.Akkermans & G.M.Schwartz 2003: The archaeology of Syria, p. 13, 'For the late third and early second millennia BC, we retain the conventional use of the "middle" chronology, dating the fall of Babylon to the Hittites at 1595 BC. Although some scholars have recently called for the adoption of a "low" chronology, dating the fall of Babylon to c. 1500, we feel that there are still too many uncertainties to justify departing from conventional dates.'
• A.Sagona & P.Zimansky 2009: Ancient Turkey, p. 251 (n.10), 'Dates are to the "Middle Chronology" [...] as a convention.'
• A.Kuhrt 1997: Ancient Near East C. 3000-330 BC, p. 12, 'The so-called 'Middle Chronology', used by most standard works (e.g. CAH, rev. edn [0B], places Hammurabi in 1792-1750, but there are attractive arguments in favour of lower and higher chronologies. [...] On the whole, I have followed the middle chronology for the sake of convenience [...].'
• M.Van De Mieroop 2007: A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000-323 BC, p. 4, 'Different systems are in use and the one called "Middle Chronology" has been the most popular, although it has often been justifiably attacked. It dates the reign of King Hammurabi of Babylon from 1792 to 1750. I have taken over this system without comment, or even a belief that it is superior to alternatives, because it is the most commonly used, which should make it easier for readers to consult other scholarship.'

Whatever the result of this discussion, it should at least be clear that the short chronology is not as widely accepted as some articles on wikipedia seem to suggest. -- Zoeperkoe (talk) 21:16, 30 July 2010 (UTC)

Well, I've been using the short chronology so I suppose I should jump in here.

1) To me, by far the most important issue here is that there be a consistant dating scheme for ANE articles. For 99.999% of people who use Wikipedia, consistancy is what matters. People who are looking up Hamurabi shouldn't see his reign as being a different set of dates in 4 different places. The few people in the know can add or subtract 64 years. Which particular chronolgy is use is not a big deal to me.

2) On long versus short chronology, since I don't really believe the whole Venus table thing (or Assyrian records before the Neo-Assyrian period for that matter) to me the entire 64 year difference is a red herring. My sense is that the field is converging to a shorter chronology. A lot of the references that use the Middle chronology are just feeding off Brinkman, which is more than 30 years old. Much has happened since then. As I said, my feel for the situation is that in the Near East, Aegean, and Egyptian area, dates are drifting down. Having said that, I don't view it as important, for the reasons I mentioned above. Whatever the wiki-consensus turns out be is fine with me. Ploversegg (talk) 21:02, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Lamassu

...is a bit of a mess. I began copyediting it but not actually sure of the scope of the definition. Anyone familiar is welcome to chip in. Casliber (talk · contribs) 20:42, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Merge discussion for Tel Dan

An article that you have been involved in editing, Tel Dan , has been proposed for a merge with another article. If you are interested in the merge discussion, please participate by going here, and adding your comments on the discussion page. Thank you. Sreifa (talk) 10:29, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Cleaning up IPA letters used in names

Do we have a guideline for how to transcribe pharyngeals and glottals in Semitic and Ancient NE names? I'm running through all the IPA letters that aren't formatted with one of the IPA templates, and most of the ʕ, ʔ, ˤ, and ˀ are in such names. For example, at Heliopolis (ancient) there is "אן ˀOn, and און ˀĀwen (or ˀÔn)" at the end of the lede, and "Per-Aat (*Par-ʕĀʔat, written pr-ˁ3t, 'Great House') and Per-Atum (*Par-ʔAtāma, written pr-ỉtmw 'Temple [lit. 'House'] of Atum"' > Hebrew פתם‎ Pithom)" in the next paragraph, which use all four of those letters. In a modern context, at Omdurman we have Khalifa ˤAbdullahi ibn Muḥammad; the other three letters are just as common in Arabic and Hebrew as in Egyptian etc. I can understand the desire for these, as traditional ‘ vs ’ is not visibly very salient, and tends to get conflated when copying and pasting text. We have a long history of ע being mistaken for א because of problems like this.

Another common example is the use of the ejective diacritic, ʼ, in place of the apostrophe. I think it might be preferred because it never displays as a straight '.

Now, besides complicating my attempts to clean up the IPA, these may not display properly on all browsers; if I'm going to clean them up (I mostly ignored them on my last run), I might as well convert them to your preferences. So,

• How should the pharyngeal, Arabic ع, be transcribed for Semitic and Egyptian? (And possible Berber etc.)
• How should the glottal stop be transcribed for same?

I have 2600 hits from the WP dump, and probably half are due to this. — kwami (talk) 23:02, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

here is my opinion: in the first place, this isn't about IPA at all, it is about transliterating ancient languages. So you shouldn't use {{IPA}} but {{lang}} ({{lang|sem|}}, ,{{lang|egy|}} ...). For each language transliterated, a best practice should be established at the article about the language itself, i.e. our recommended transliteration for Ugaritic should be the one used at Ugaritic language, the transliteration of Egyptian should be in one of the systems discussed at Transliteration of Ancient Egyptian, etc. --dab (𒁳) 20:33, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks.

These are all instances which do not use an IPA template, and I wasn't thinking of adding them. I'm only using IPA templates for IPA, and trying to ensure that all IPA uses a template.

Mostly following your advice, I've decided to go with the 'modifier letter apostrophe' ʼ for glottal stop and 'okina ʻ for 'ayn in the case of Semitic (ancient and modern), and with ꜣ, ꜥ for Egyptian. This should hopefully format well and be search-friendly. I'm not going to bother with lang templates, as that's just too much work to bring the entire article in line. — kwami (talk) 21:28, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

RfC at Talk:History of ancient Israel and Judah#Conformity/verification of sources

Input from anyone interested in the Bronze and Iron age history of this region would be very useful. Thanks. Dougweller (talk) 12:30, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

Sidqia

The Sennacherib article mentioned a king named "Sidqia". The Sidqia article was a link to Zedekiah, but that is wrong because Zedekiah lived a century after Sennacherib. Therefore I've changed the article but it really needs a makeover by someone who knows something about this stuff. I wander is a "Sidqia" really existed. Mismeret (talk) 21:03, 26 October 2010 (UTC)

Ancient Near East archaeological sites reorganization (Suggestion)

Zoeperkoe and I have been having a discussion on how best to categorize and organize archaeological sites in the Ancient Middle East, so that they'd be easily, and more intuitively accessible and navigable. We would like any feedback from participants, to come with some sort of a standard.

It seems to make sense to categorize the sites by the different epochs during which they were occupied. So far the main epochs we could agree on were the following:

• Paleolithic
• Epipalaeolithic
• Neolithic
• Chalcolithic
• Bronze Age
• Iron Age
• Persian
• Hellenistic
• Roman/Byzantine (Sassanid for Mesopotamia)
• Islamic
• Ottoman

For an applied example of how this would look like, please see the main/parent category for archaeological sites in Greece, Category:Archaeological sites in Greece.

Nevertheless, this method leaves us with two main problems.

1. Some sites have spanned many different epochs (Hama has been first settled in the Neolithic, and has been continuously inhabited since), should we include the site in all the categories (and would that lead to too many categories in some articles)? Should we only include it in the category when occupation started and/or important epochs in its history.
2. Should this categorization be ANE-wide, or country-centric. Example, should it be Category:Neolithic sites in Syria or Category:Neolithic sites in the Ancient Near East? (The first would preserve the territorial/historical integrity of the area, and might better serve those who are interested in the study of ANE as one. The second would make it easier to focus on certain countries in the region)

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Yazan (talk) 19:00, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

For Anatolia, I suggest two different epoches instead of Iron Age: Hitit and Post Hitit. Also Seljuk Age (including the Anatolian beyliks) instead of Islamic Age may be better.Nedim Ardoğa (talk) 12:24, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Assyrian Revisionist History

In my humble opionion, there has been a program of creating questionable history and other elements in order to create a revisionist picture of anything related to Assyria operating for well over a year. As far as I can tell, there is only one individual involved, working under a Wiki name and an IP name at different times of the day:

• Special:contributions/Sinharib99
• Special:contributions/81.106.116.120

though see also

• Special:contributions/94.11.167.229
• Special:contributions/81.111.101.129

a good example being seen if one views the history of List of Kings of Babylon. Some examples of affected articles include Akkadian Empire, Kassites, Babylonia and a slew of other regional peoples (Chaldeans, Arameans, Urartians etc) and places. Note that I don't point to the main articles like Assyrian people etc as they are a lost cause.

I understand that in the Wiki framework you can't keep someone who is willing to spend every waking hour building a web of fiction from doing just that. My intention here is simply to leave a pointer for future Wikipedia editors that

• All the mainline Assyrian related articles are suspect and will have to be someday rewritten, some perhaps from scratch.
• Editors coming across Assyrian references in articles should take them with a healthy grain of salt, especially if they are edits by the above editor.

Thank you for having taken the time to read this. Ploversegg (talk) 03:14, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

Janus

There is a theory claiming that Roman god Janus is a derivation of an ancient Syrian uranic deity. Pierre Grimal supported this view in a book published in 1951, which I cannot consult, so I am not sure about the identification. R. Schilling names a Sumeric god named Usmu (who is represented as introducing worshippers to other gods) and William Betham a god Baalianus or Belinus, that he thought to be related to Oannes. As far as the etymology is concerned what god could be the most likely identification? Are there any quotable works dealing with the issue ? Thank s for the attention.Aldrasto11 (talk) 14:24, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Law of Moses -> Torah merge proposal

Members of this project may wish to contribute. Whatever the articles are called (a rename might be better) I believe that Wikipedia:Content forking is necessary where it proves difficult to accomodate the actual law of the Ancient Israelites in Canaan either in the Moses bio, where it was, or in the clearly living Judaism focussed Torah article to where an editor has proposed a move. In ictu oculi (talk) 03:15, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

Clay tablet with glass recipes

On Lead_glass#History a clay tablet with a glass recipes is mentioned. In the source provided it is dated around 1700BC. But reading another reference provided few lines above, for what I assume to be the same tablet, is given a date between 14th and 12th century BC. In this second reference an image of the tablet is provided. Since I'm always curious and unfortunately unable to get full access to the first reference given, I was wondering if anyone of you could bring some light to the issue.

• 1st Reference - CHARLESTON, R. J. (1960), LEAD IN GLASS. Archaeometry, 3: 1–4.
• 2nd Reference - 2nd Reference - F. Tait, Hugh, ed (2004). Five Thousand Years of Glass. University of Pennsylvania Press (orig. British Museum Press). ISBN 978-0-8122-1888-6.

Thanks in advance! --Dia^ (talk) 12:53, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

Bold proposal to reorganize Template:Ancient Mesopotamia

I have made a proposal to reorganize Template:Ancient Mesopotamia. See here for the discussion; see here for the actual new draft. Your input is appreciated!--Zoeperkoe (talk) 18:45, 30 October 2011 (UTC)

Naming Dispute over History of Pottery in the Southern Levant

Recently, the article History of Pottery in the Southern Levant was moved to History of Pottery in Palestine. It had been under the title History of Pottery in the Southern Levant for around 5 years, and it had been my understanding that this was in order to keep the article NPOV. I am currently in a dispute with the editor who moved the page on the article talk page and was wondering if anyone would be able to assist regarding the proper naming of the article. Thanks Drsmoo (talk) 11:00, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

ASPRO chronology

We have a new editor, A Timelord (talk · contribs) who has, in his words, started a time war, changing dates to Aspro chronology using "cal BCE". I'm not convinced this is a good idea. Any comments? Dougweller (talk) 22:18, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

• I have come to Wikipedia and studied your rules Dougweller, the only slight anomaly with the terminology may be considered under the rule that states;

Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point: State your point. However, do not spam Wikipedia, disingenuously nominate articles for deletion, push rules to their limits, or otherwise create work for other people just to prove your point.

I assume that the rule about creating work for other people to prove a point is governed by the adjective disingenuously by the nature of the statement. This would otherwise create a paradox that the Wikipedia project is not here to create work. Hence, I intend to proceed with my assistance to this work without being disingenous and apologise at any moment when I am not appearing to be ingenius. A Timelord (talk) 12:01, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

Eannatum

Sorry to disturb. I found the article about the Sumerian king of Lagash Eannatum a bit lacking. I expressed some of my doubts on the talk page: is someone willing to check? Thanks!79.51.8.1 (talk) 21:57, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

Early Israelite Campaigns, Battle of Ai, Battle of the Waters of Merom

Should these articles even exist? They're based only on descriptions from the Book of Joshua. My 50-year-old edition of the Oxford Annotated Bible gives more credence to the early books of the Tanakh than most scholars today seem to do, but even it treats the Book of Joshua as little better than nationalistic fiction. Certainly I don't think these supposed battles should be described in the factual style that these articles use now. A. Parrot (talk) 18:43, 5 March 2012 (UTC)

There's no reason the articles shouldn't exist. Whether true or not, the subjects were and are clearly important enough for numerous people, be they medieval artists or modern historians and archaeologists. Even had these events never occurred, their effects on religion, arts and politics are real enough, as is the debate about them. Were we to delete anything that is a myth rather than history we might as well delete articles about the Odyssey and King Arthur. Poliocretes (talk) 10:09, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

That isn't a justification for keeping them as separate articles. No one is suggesting remove all mention of them from Wikipedia. And I agree that there is a big problem about the way they are described. See also Jabin and for a really bad one, Early Israelite Campaigns which is a stub that should be a redirect or something. Dougweller (talk) 12:08, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

Map for Palestine Ancient Period

There is currently a discussion on which map to include for the Ancient period in the History section of the Palestine article. The discussion is currently deadlocked so any thoughtful input from knowledgeable/interested editors would be very helpful.

The discussion on the ancient map is at the bottom of Talk:Palestine (just to clarify as there is another discussion on the main map for the article further up the page). Thanks, Dlv999 (talk) 17:04, 12 March 2012 (UTC).

Jerusalem articles in dire need of attention

Hi all, there are various important Jerusalem-related articles out there which are in dire need of attention. Jerusalem during the Crusader period and Jerusalem during the Mamluk period were machine-translated from the extensive articles on Hebrew-wiki and are currently incomprehensible. They were recently blanked and transformed into redirects, but that was undone as a lot of good information, unavailable elsewhere, would have been lost. Any effort going into transforming the two above-mentioned into proper articles would be much appreciated, be it translation, formatting, grammar, citations or images. We once went through the same process with Jerusalem during the Second Temple Period and the result wasn't half bad. Poliocretes (talk) 15:53, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Ancient Civilizations Textbook

Hello all! I’m working with the Saylor foundation to create a series of original, crowd-sourced textbooks that will be openly licensed and freely available on the web and within Saylor’s free, self-paced courses at Saylor.org. We are using Wikibooks as a platform to host this project and hope to garner the interest of existing members of the Wikibooks and Wikipedia community, as well as bring in new members! We thought that some of your members may be interested in contributing to our book Saylor.org's Ancient Civilizations of the World. Azinheira (talk) 18:18, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Sumerian kings

Why does the navigation bar at Iltasadum and others give dates not at Sumerian King List? We have the firsts king in the list, Jushur given a date of "ca. 2550 BC, or legendary" while Iltasadum is "after ca 2900". Dougweller (talk) 15:29, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Probably because there are about ten sources of Sumerian King Lists in the Jacobsen source that Wikipedia's article is based on. [* Jacobsen, Thorkild. The Sumerian King List. [University of Chicago Oriental Institute|Oriental Institute]], Assyriological Studies 11, University of Chicago Press, 1939] Nothing prior to Sargon at 2250 BCE is datable very well because of this, which is a shame. It leaves the average reader with very little understanding of how Sumer preceded Egypt, which has more reliable dating back to 2750 BCE. The only person who's ever put together a cohesive, unified chronological theory for Early Dynastic Sumer is Laurence Waddell, who's hyperdiffusion theories have probably appeared too fringey for most to bother reading. I find them an excellent reference tool and his swathes of entmological evidence persuasive in some areas. His translations and comparisons of Indus script with Cuneiform may also be considered by some as fringe, but I would suggest they are on the borders of mainstream simply because very few people have become expert enough in the dual fields of Cuneiform studies and Indus valley script to be able to comment. I feel it has attracted enough notability however in some sources to support an article on it, ideally a table matching the Sumerian with Vedic king lists. I recently made a page on King Puru, who Waddell equated with the deified king Utu at the start of the first Uruk Dynasty ruling between about 3242 to 3247 BCE. I kinda wanted to know how far I could go before someone shouted at me about it being fringe again. Ideally I'd like to create a table linking to Wadell's page that shows Waddell's chronology that can at least be used as a study aid to assist with fathoming Jacobsen's wonderful, but sadly far-too-single-disciplinary study and give people a better understanding of civilization's history. Paul Bedson ❉talk❉ 15:32, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

ANE Chronology

I think everyone would agree that the dating of ANE articles is a mess, especially with regards to the chronology used. I'm not looking to "standardize" the chronology we use (that would be a massive effort, let alone a very divisive debate, I suspect) but can't we have some sort of a maintenance template/category (or at least a field in the WP banner on the talk page) that can help us tag articles according to the chronology used in them, so that we keep track? Yazan (talk) 05:51, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Hi Yazan, I've done a lot of work on this writing about the ASPRO chronology created and used by the Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée which is part of the University of Lyon, France and likely the most respected academic body in ANE prehistoric research (up to about 4500 BCE). You can check almost every ancient site with a date before that on the Maison's interactive atlas, which is an online, refereneable database of Francis Hours publication "Atlas des sites Prochaine-Orient 14000 et 5700 BP" Atlas des sites Prochaine-Orient 14000 et 5700 BP - MOM's online application - Atlas of Near East Archaeological Sites 14000 to 5700 BP.

You can also use the University of Cologne's online Radiocarbon CONTEXT database [1] to reference particular levels at particular sites for the c14 dates, but don't just go jumping in there taking the earliest dates without checking the level that you're referencing with the original archaeological report for the site. There can be several dates in there before those of an actual settlement being referred to.

Also please be aware that dates move, and it is best to use those in the latest publication possible. Archaeologists have an annoying tendancy of publishing sneaky papers (often in French) that re-date levels of (often really big) sites. For instance, Danielle Stordeur recently abolished the Aswadian PPNA culture and pushed the PPNB back. I also recently had to push back the dating on Byblos around 3000 years (from around 5000 to 8800 BCE) after Yosef Garfinkel published an article redating it's lowest PPNB level to match Jericho's.

Hope these resources help improving the dating of ancient sites, prehistoric ones at least, which I totally agree are in a mess on many articles. More help the merrier on this everyone! Paul Bedson ❉talk❉ 14:59, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Prehistoric dates aren't even the big problem, because it's widely recognized that prehistoric dates by their nature are approximations and estimations, not exact calendar years a specific event occurred. The really big problem I think Yazan refers to, is the fact that there is no consensus among scholars for how to plug in any dates for historically recorded events in ANE before around 1100 BC or so. For example, when did Hammurabi reign? The three major competing systems are short, middle and long chronologies, and several lesser systems outside of these, but no attempts to prove which is likeliest using eclipses has satisfied everyone, so the only honest answer we can give without playing favorites, is that there are at least three different chronological schemes for exactly what years Hammurabi reigned. Again, this has little to do with the problem of prehistoric dates which tend not to be for precisely known events, but even vaguer and more general "happenings" conjectured to have occurred before written records were kept. Til Eulenspiegel (talk) 15:23, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply Paul. I was actually talking about historical dating in this instance. While I slightly disagree in that I feel through the sources I use that the Middle chronology is the most widely accepted (at least in the context of the Levant), it doesn't change the fact that this is a serious issue on ANE articles. What I am suggesting is that we start tackling it with a hidden maintenance template/category (although it might be useful for the reader to see such template) that specifies the chronology used in each individual article. So that, when and if, we can reach a consensus on the chronology to use, it would be easier to go about it. Or at least have a standard text template that links to the used chronology that we require all articles to use in the infobox/after the first date... something like the c. template (which would solve two problems: allow us to inform the reader of the chronology, and easily and automatically add the corresponding maintenance category). Yazan (talk) 15:37, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

I like that, but I'm not a template person and don't particularly like infoboxes which oversimplify complicated issues (see my user page for more). How about categories (as well as a template perhaps)? They're designed to help navigate and would make a good way to locate articles using one particular chronology. Dougweller (talk) 15:51, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Agreed about categories. I've went ahead and created a simple draft template that takes one variable (sc, mc, lc) - it adds a link to the chronology (preferably after a date), and a category corresponding to it.

For example: User:Zozo2kx/Template:Chronology, User:Zozo2kx/Template:Chronology, User:Zozo2kx/Template:Chronology

The categories won't show up (because we are in a talkpage, but it adds a cat of the format (Short chronology article).

Now, we just need to agree on the names of the categories? Yazan (talk) 16:20, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Good idea, but further complicated by use of the terms high, low, medium and ultra-low chronologies for the same thing! Til Eulenspiegel (talk) 16:27, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes, but I think that (short, middle, long) are by far the most common, no? The article on the ANE chronology, certainly needs some work. Yazan (talk) 16:39, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Sure does. Those three are the most common. It would be nice if each chronology had a seperate article like Short chronology does. It looks like there are even some Ultra-high chronology references out there to make a page on that along with Ultra-low chronology, which could mean the eventual creation of five categories. Paul Bedson ❉talk❉ 19:01, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

This is a discussion I am not getting in the middle of this time. :-) Yes, the ANE chronol|ogy situation is a mess, because it reflects the current mess in the actual ANE field. I created the Short chronology timeline not because I am in love with the short chronology but in the vain hope that if we could use a single set of dates for all ANE articles and people with other chronology religions could just adjust to their view on the fly. Alas the religious differences are too strong for that. I will add two minor points before I retreat 1) a big problem is that many published radiocarbon dates you read are calibrated with some calibration scale (they may even not say which one) and the actual counts are not listed so you can't even map to the latest scale. Makes it hard to compare apples to apples. Look into INTCAL if you are curious. 2) The 64 year thing that separates the short and long chronologies is looking weaker all the time so don't take that too strictly. PS I'm not sure I would sign on to Egyptian chronology being solid to quite THAT early, but that's just my humble opinion. :-)Ploversegg (talk) 19:37, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Not really relevant since this is about historic chronology, but please note that Paul Bedson's praise of ASPRO/MOM is not accurate. ASPRO is neither the only nor the best prehistoric chronology available. In fact, outside French language academia, it is quite rarely used. I also advise against his suggestion of using the latest articles on sites. These articles represent the ongoing debate, which can shift back and forth. Rather, Wikipedia must rely on handbooks (like Akkermans & Schwartz's Archaeology of Syria, with which some of you are undoubtedly familiar), as these (usually) reflect the state of knowledge as it is widely accepted in the scientific field and therefore more likely to stay stable in the long term. And some of this obviously also applies to the Long/Middle/Short debate. Just my two cents.--Zoeperkoe (talk) 16:55, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

• I agree with the sentiment that nobody should be tied into using any particular chronology based on any specific POV. Akkermans & Schwartz vary by only a century or two at most from ASPRO, so it makes little difference in that case. I would point out that ANE (particularly Syrian and Lebanese) prehistoric chronology has been established predominantly from results of excavations carried out by French language academia, and Peter Akkermans will probably be pulling most of his data from the big French digs by Henri de Contenson, Danielle Stordeur, Jacques Cauvin, Francis Hours, Maurice Dunand, etc.

I've recently created Middle chronology, which is currently a bit of an explanation of the current arguments regarding chronologies, that may eventually get split apart and form Long chronology, Ultra-low chronology and Ultra-high chronology pages that can form the basis of category main pages. Whilst we can keep with the Short chronology standard, I feel the need to explore these variances to clarify the "mess" that this section has been labelled with. I've even felt the need to express extreme variances such as Waddell's chronology to provide broader coverage of notable contributions to our understanding of ANE chronology. I find the argument that 99.99% of Wikipedia readership wants consistency a bit of a step over NPOV and into OR territory and we should move with the times. Fascinating stuff by Christian Eder and Leonhard Sassmannshausen published in 2004 and 2006 respectively has barely been covered here for instance. All contributions and suggestions welcome in any case. Paul Bedson ❉talk❉ 13:06, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

Paul, another cautionary note, and I apologize if this comes across as rude; that is not my intention. Syrian/Lebanese prehistoric chronology has NOT predominantly been established by French academia (think only about where terms like PPNA/B came from). If that is your impression, it might be because you haven't read much else besides French papers. Furthermore, Akkermans pulls his data from his own excavation. If you read papers on Sabi Abyad you will see plenty of, if not more, references to non-French papers as well. Finally, Waddell is completely irrelevant for modern ANE archaeology. I am sorry to say (and you might have heard this before), but sometimes you seem to have a penchant for finding the most obscure references available, and then get carried away by them.--Zoeperkoe (talk) 23:05, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the courtesy, your posts always get my deepest deliberation and I appreciate your point of view. I cannot argue that Kathleen Kenyon's work was NOT the foundation for PPNA/B Syrian/Lebanese chronology but French academia has done a lot of work after that in the northern Levant. I'll take your criticism of my language on board. Regarding Waddell, the reason I got carried away with that a bit is due to the situation with chronologies at present, where we have a more robust Egyptian chronology spanning back to 3000 BCE, and a less robust Ancient Near East Chronology and Sumerian King List that only goes back to around 2300 BCE. This leaves the layman reader with the problem of appearances. Scholars are all well aware that Sumerians preceded Egyptians and go back to around 4000 BCE, but this is not currently easy to understand due to the reliability state of the two chronologies in play. As long as it is labelled correctly as being "not/no longer accepted by mainstream academia", I think it should help people with comprehension of the subject, and how chronologies developed. There was influence between Waddell and Jacobsen, they were contemporaries, and Jacobsen is still the basis for the ANE chronology we use on here today. Even if totally incorrect, it is still the only attempt I know of to place the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations in the correct order and I feel this has some value to the layman, even if comparitively insignificant for informed scholarship. Paul Bedson ❉talk❉ 17:04, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

I'd disagree that the Sumerians were before the Old Kingdom in Egypt. There are just no archeological documents in Sumerian language going back to 4000 BC. What you stated is hardly as unanimous as you claim. Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 17:24, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

Mari, Syria collaboration

I am interested in bringing the ancient city of Mari, Syria to GA status, but it's a project well beyond my individual efforts and would probably require some help from people who have more expertise on the subject. If anyone is interested in helping out, please feel free to drop me a note, and perhaps we could start working on organizing a draft somewhere. The article itself, at the moment, is useless. Many thanks. Yazan (talk) 16:21, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

Template:WikiProject Ancient Near East

I had a thought on some perimeters we could add to Template:WikiProject Ancient Near East. "Mesopotamia=yes" could add a page to wp:Iraq, "anotolea=yes" could add a page to wp:Turkey, etc. The trickery part would be "palistine=yes" to add a page to both wp's Palestine and Israel. I don't have the technical skills to modify the template like that tough. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 18:40, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Periods and type sites

Just a heads up for whoever has watchlisted prehistoric Mesopotamian sites; where this had not yet been done, I have split off the articles on type sites and the periods/cultures named after them. This had already been done for a lot of other periods (for example, Uruk and Uruk period, Tell Halaf and Halaf culture, Jemdet Nasr and Jemdet Nasr period) so I thought it only consistent to do this with the few that still remained. Affected are:

• Hassuna, moved to Tell Hassuna and Hassuna culture
• Samarra, where I split off the material on prehistoric culture to Samarra culture
• Ubaid period, where material on the type site was moved to Tell al-`Ubaid

In no case was material deleted. It is just a reordering of material that, I think, allows for better expansion of articles, and also gives each affected article a much better scope and well-defined topic.--Zoeperkoe (talk) 11:55, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Mesopotamian deities

Why is this category change happening? Chris Troutman (talk) 06:43, 20 April 2014 (UTC)

The user appears to want to subdivide Mesopotamian deities into subcategories according to sex. I see no good reason for doing so. Thanatosimii (talk) 21:54, 20 April 2014 (UTC)

Tanit

Eyes needed on claim this was first a Berber goddess. Dougweller (talk) 17:27, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Template:Aramaeans: The template links to Reson, which redirects to Aramaean kings, which doesn't mention Reson. Please fix it somewhere. trespassers william (talk) 18:24, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

Disambiguating divinities

There is a request for comment at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Religion. The question is: when a divinity has an ambiguous name, should its title use the word "(mythology)", "(deity)", or either "(god)" or "(goddess)"?

Anyone interested can make comments at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Religion#Disambiguations of divinities. A. Parrot (talk) 03:16, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

Cyaxares II

Assistance from experts is required at Cyaxares II. A significant amount of material has recently been added by one editor, including many conclusions that seem to be original research, and an overarching POV that seems opposed to the mainstream view. I have done some copyediting on the article to remove some of the worst non-neutral POV issues, but close attention by experts on the subject is required. Thanks.--Jeffro77 (talk) 23:16, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

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Merge Aryasb into Abradatas

It has been proposed to merge the article at Aryasb into the article at Abradatas. Discussion at Talk:Abradatas#Merge from Aryasb. --Bejnar (talk) 17:44, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

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Hittite royal family tree

I made a family tree of kings, queens, and other key figures from the Hittite New Kingdom. This is collapsible, so it could just appear as a bar across the bottom unless people expand it. Now, I actually made this template primarily for my own edification (keeping these relationships straight in my mind as I was reading Bryce's Kingdom of the Hittites), but how would people feel about adding it to the articles about the people concerned? Q·L·1968 ☿ 16:39, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

Go for it. Many Roman-related articles already have similar templates. Dimadick (talk) 15:59, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

Done. Thanks for the encouragement! (By the way, I may have helped start that trend with the Romans!) Q·L·1968 ☿ 19:17, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

Proposed article move from Syro-Palestinian archaeology to Levantine archaeology

There is a proposal to move from Syro-Palestinian archaeology to Levantine archaeology here. Your opinions would be welcome, thanks! Drsmoo (talk) 00:47, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

History of Persia

There used to be a user named History of Persia, who got blocked for hoax contributions and for being a sockpuppet of Artin Mehraban in June. Some information this user created is still being used. In particular, I am wondering about File:Provinces of the Achaemenid empire.png. How reliable is this map? Do we need to go through more of this user's edits? — Sebastian 16:56, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

Certainly the part on the Levant looks like WP:OR - I have never seen that before. It looks like a jumble of sources have been used, with different time periods. Oncenawhile (talk) 23:10, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

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Semitic peoples

I'm trying to make Semitic peoples a half-decent article covering the history, culture, language, etc. It's a pretty huge task and I could really use some help. My model is Germanic peoples, which is fantastically comprehensive. However our article would need to be much longer... because the history is much longer (and more interesting :P). --Monochrome_Monitor 02:32, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Due to silliness the article is now located here in my userspace. Feel free to contribute... --Monochrome_Monitor 20:21, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

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Contests

User:Dr. Blofeld has created Wikipedia:WikiProject Africa/Contests. The idea is to run a series of contests/editathons focusing on each region of Africa. He has spoken to Wikimedia about it and $1000-1500 is possible for prize money. Would anybody here be interested in contributing to one or assisting draw up core article/missing article lists? He says he's thinking of North Africa for an inaugural one in October. If interested please sign up in the participants section of the Contest page, thanks.♦ --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 20:01, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

Input requested at Southern Levant

Currently working to expand Southern Levant, particularly in the areas of geography and archaeology. Any help from editors knowledgeable int he field would be appreciated! Drsmoo (talk) 21:12, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Translation needed of cuneiform tablet

File:Complaint tablet to Ea-nasir - front.jpg

Complaint tablet to Ea-nasir

A request has been made for a proper translation of this complaint letter. If you can read it, please visit and comment at:

• Talk:Complaint tablet to Ea-nasir#Can someone transcribe the original letter for the article?

Many thanks.

Anna Frodesiak (talk) 08:01, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

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Popular pages report

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Deir Mar Maroun listed at Requested moves

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RfC that might be of interest

Hello,

There is an RfC on Talk:Iran that might be of interest to members of this WikiProject.

Thanks,

Genealogizer (talk) 04:36, 25 June 2017 (UTC)

Long-standing problems with chronology at Siege of Jerusalem (587 BC)

I don't know what to do about this but if anyone has an interest, their help would be welcome. Doug Weller talk 09:43, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

babylonien scriptures ?

Index with words explaations.

Hello, I've find some letters in a books write bay Joseph Justus Scaliger printed in 1624. Is it really translation from Babylonian words ? Can you categorised in commons ? Sincerely Garitan (talk) 09:07, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

No, those are hebrew words. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Richard Eldritch (talk • contribs) 18:32, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

MoS cleanup point: all caps and small caps

In the process of overhauling WP:Manual of Style/Capital letters#All caps and small caps (MOS:ALLCAPS) to make more sense generally and, for linguistic stuff in particular, to make sense people without advanced degrees, I came across a problem. I raised this originally at WT:LINGUISTICS, and copy the entire thread here:

One last clarification on this part: There's an old instruction in there that "Transcription of logograms (as opposed to phonograms) can also be done with small caps or all caps." What applicability could this have here? I don't see this used in Wikipedia anywhere; all the direct representations of logograms are given "as they are" (樂) with the appropriate {{lang|zh}} or whatever markup (and many logogrammatic languages have no upper/lower case system, at least not in Unicode); Romanized transcriptions are given in italics (yuè); and English glosses [canonically] in single quotes ('music'). In actual practice, much of all three forms of markup is missing or wrong (e.g. double quotes on English glosses, and so forth). This was true at Logogram, which I just overhauled (other than things like yuè are not marked up as {{lang|zh-[something here]|yuè}}; I don't know the particulars of such stuff for Chinese).

Anyway, the mystery reference to logograms in the MoS wording has been commented out for now.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  08:24, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: Maybe it's about cuneiform? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform_script#Transliteration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_language#Sample_text Umimmak (talk) 08:30, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

@Umimmak: That sounds plausible, i.e. that it's an extension of the HIC IACET style for Classical Latin to other ancient languages, including those in other scripts. It seems a bit superfluous if so. However, something's going on at the second of those articles, with some stuff in this style and some not, and it's not clear [to me] what difference this is intended to signify (but it may be important to get this right): "30–31: SAḪAR.DU₆.TAKA₄-bi eden-na ki ba-ni-us₂-us₂". Whatever it is, this would surely be less annoyingly shouty as "30–31: SAḪAR.DU₆.TAKA₄-bi eden-na ki ba-ni-us₂-us₂".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  09:08, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

Found a hint at Dingir: "By Assyriological convention, capitals identify a cuneiform sign used as a word, while the phonemic value of a sign in a given context is given in lower case." But there's no source for this.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  09:10, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
Source: "Never put logograms in capitals: only uninterpreted sign names, and complex signs are in upper case [2]", which is not quite the same statement. And this appears to be a set of instructions for a special form of encoding, not for writing natural-language linguistic prose that includes some cuneiform.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  09:16, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
Another, saying something related but different: 'If the letters that make up the transliteration are written in upper case, e.g., “PA” ..., then the transliteration merely refers to or represents the cuneiform sign without making any claim about how the sign is pronounced. Letters in lower case, e.g., “pa” ..., presuppose a phonetic interpretation on the part of the modern text editor.' [3]

Blatantly conflicting convention: "Akkadian words are given in italics, with logograms set in small capitals" [4], and "Transliterations: ... texts are set with Sumerian logograms in small capitals and Akkadian words in italics; unknown readings are given in large capitals." [5]
A third system, encountered in several works: "[D]ifferent formats are used to distinguish between Hittite words, Sumerograms, and Akkadograms ... [E]verything Hittite is lower case .... Sumerograms are given in roman capitals (in this book in small capitals: EN) .... Akkadograms are also capitalized but italicized ...."[6]. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  09:38, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

So, this is messy. I'm suspecting that similar conventions exist for other specialized areas of study; this stuff can probably just be an example in a footnote, to a line item that, in some wording, says something to the effect of "In particular linguistic subfields, like Assyriology^[fn1], there are special conventions for the use of all caps and sometimes small caps. When the convention is not distinguishing between all and small caps, normalize to small caps to be easier on readers' eyes. Regardless, use a consistent style throughout an article." Does that seem like a reasonable approach?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  09:38, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: Two relevant pages from Fortson [7]. Umimmak (talk) 09:21, 27 November 2017 (UTC) Addendum: If I am right and the MOS was in reference to writing Sumerograms, perhaps you should ask Wikipedia:WikiProject Ancient Near East as well. Umimmak (talk) 09:37, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

I'll do that, though I think this is not ultimately going to be entirely about that stuff, but just a general "don't use full-size ALL CAPS without reason, and use a consistent system intra-article" statement.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  09:43, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

The gist: MOS doesn't need to get into any language-specific details like italic small caps for Akkadian and full-size all caps for Sumerian, or one of the other (seemingly intra-language rather than inter-language) systems. It just needs to have a footnote that various systems exist, to be consistent in use of one in a single article, and to avoid full-size all caps if the system permits it. Is that going to be good enough? If this (or another) wikiproject has a WP:PROJPAGE recommending a specific system, we can link to it from MOS:ALLCAPS.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  09:53, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

Akkadian listed at Requested moves

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WikiProject collaboration notice from the Portals WikiProject

The reason I am contacting you is because there are one or more portals that fall under this subject, and the Portals WikiProject is currently undertaking a major drive to automate portals that may affect them.

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Background

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RfC pointer: Arab/Arabic/Arabian

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see: Re-RfCing Arab/Arabic

Gist: to include or not include advice about usage and misusage the terms Arab, Arabic, and Arabian (most of it originally at MOS:IDENTITY but removed last year).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:47, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

RfC

Please see Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#RfC:Genetics_references Jytdog (talk) 17:04, 9 September 2018 (UTC)

Temple Denial listed at Requested moves

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Please comment on Talk:Alexander the Great in the Quran

Your feedback would be appreciated at this request for comment on Talk:Alexander the Great in the Quran. Mathglot (talk) 19:34, 26 May 2019 (UTC)

RM discussion on Jericho (Tell es-Sultan)

Please comment: Talk:Tell es-Sultan.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 14:39, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

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Problems with portrayal of historicity at The Exodus

I believe I have identified problems with the portrayal of sources concerning the historicity of the Exodus and would like outside input. Please see Talk:The Exodus#Lede citations and mis-citations.--Ermenrich (talk) 21:58, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

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Article class dispute at En Esur

You're invited to participate at the discussion regarding the article class of En Esur. —comrade waddie96 ★ (talk) 09:04, 10 October 2019 (UTC)

Request for information on WP1.0 web tool

Hello and greetings from the maintainers of the WP 1.0 Bot! As you may or may not know, we are currently involved in an overhaul of the bot, in order to make it more modern and maintainable. As part of this process, we will be rewriting the web tool that is part of the project. You might have noticed this tool if you click through the links on the project assessment summary tables.

We'd like to collect information on how the current tool is used by....you! How do you yourself and the other maintainers of your project use the web tool? Which of its features do you need? How frequently do you use these features? And what features is the tool missing that would be useful to you? We have collected all of these questions at this Google form where you can leave your response. Walkerma (talk) 04:23, 27 October 2019 (UTC)

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Standardization of era "successions"?

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see: Talk:Mousterian#Clean up era "succession" mess.

This started as a one-article issue report, but looking around I see that the problem is pretty common (in short: conflicting "preceding/following era" links in infoboxes, navboxes, leads, and article bodies).

It needs a site-wide solution (perhaps a cross-wikiproject guideline or at least a WP:PROJPAGE with some advice in it).
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:36, 16 November 2019 (UTC)

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Need a second version of {{Near East Neolithic}} to satisfy WP:ERA

{{Near East Neolithic}} uses BC dating but is also used in BCE articles. For NPOV purposes I think we need a BCE version. Doug Weller talk 15:03, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

Troy could use a review

If anyone has time, could they take a look at the recent edits? Thanks. Doug Weller talk 13:35, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

Nebuchadnezzar II’s Prism

I'm attempting to write an article on Nebuchadnezzar II’s Prism at User:Daask/sandbox/Nebuchadnezzar II’s Prism. However, I think I'm mixing up multiple documents and archaelogical finds. I don't think all of my sources are discussing the same document. Can anyone help me clear up this issue? Someone who can read German would be especially helpful. Daask (talk) 13:33, 7 March 2020 (UTC)

Enuma Elish

The article "Enuma Elish" states that is was recorded in "Old Babylonian language". This redirects to "Akkadian language". Is Old Babylonian the same as Akkadian? Axl ¤ [Talk] 11:53, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

My memory is that its Akkadian written in the Old Babylonian period ie up to the "fall". Hm, a link

http://cdli.ox.ac.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=old_babylonian_letters

which might help. Ploversegg (talk) 16:12, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

Medes listed at Requested moves

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Arabic listed at Requested moves

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Paleo-Hebrew alphabet or Phoenician alphabet?

Greetings. There has been discussion as to redirecting Paleo-Hebrew alphabet to Phoenician alphabet. Insight and input from members of this WikiProject may help decide the matter. Thanks, --Deepfriedokra (talk) 18:23, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

Most-viewed start article within this Wikiproject

Levant 82,943 2,764 Start--Coin945 (talk) 16:44, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

Notice of Featured Article Review

I have nominated Roman–Persian Wars for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:38, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Leadimage at Solomon's Temple

If you have an opinion, please share. Talk:Solomon's_Temple#Leadimage. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 14:35, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

Sumerian Inscriptions

Need a bit of help here as I don't know how to use the bot correctly (sorry).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bassetki_Statue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkad_(city) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tirigan

The Sumerian inscriptions for these articles are portrayed incorrectly - Sumerian is read left to right, and these are all displayed vertically. This seems to be a wider problem with how Sumerian is displayed across multiple articles, presumably for aesthetics. I think the misconception stems from cylinder seals, which have an image which is viewed from one angle, but the text should be viewed from the other. It's not like Egyptian - the vertical orientation is as incorrect as rotating chinese characters 90 degrees.

I propose a project to correct any and all Sumerian/cuneiform images which have been rotated like this - it's incorrect and embarassing. VeritasVox (talk) 11:29, 2 October 2021 (UTC)

Another pair of eyes on Troy?

I was wondering if someone could have a look at Late Bronze Age Troy, which recently replaced an older article that was just about Troy VII. I wrote most of the text using handbook articles as my key sources, but I'm not an archaeologist so I want to be sure I didn't misunderstand anything and in particular that the use of terms like "layer" are correct. Botterweg14 (talk) 12:52, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Hasmonean dynasty#Requested move 25 October 2021

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Hasmonean dynasty#Requested move 25 October 2021 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. — Shibbolethink ^{(♔ ♕)} 12:39, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

Sumerian King List has an RFC

Sumerian King List has an RFC for possible consensus. A discussion is taking place. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments on the discussion page. Thank you. Zoeperkoe (talk) 12:29, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Scope of this WikiProject

Hello all,

There was a dispute between me and another editor recently, with this other editor adding the Ancient Near East Wikiproject template to articles that are not currently covered by what's described on the front page. My understanding is that based on Wikipedia:WikiProject Ancient Near East and Category:Ancient Near East, this period is, for Wikipedia purposes, considered to stop at the Hellenistic period.

From the article Ancient Near East:

The term covers the Bronze Age and the Iron Age in the region, until either the conquest by the Achaemenid Empire in the 6th century BC, that by the Macedonian Empire in the 4th century BC, or the Muslim conquests in the 7th century AD.

Category:Ancient Near East is a bit clearer, though:

• Dates before (ca.) 3000 BCE and after 330 BCE are not usually included in the term "Ancient Near East":

• dates before (ca.) 3000 BCE fall into the prehistoric period
• dates after 330 BCE fall into the Hellenistic period

In my opinion, this is a good place to split it, because the Hellenistic & Roman period can be covered by Wikipedia:WikiProject Classical Greece and Rome largely. Admittedly, there is a problem in that this leaves later Persian & Arabian history out to dry, as there doesn't appear to be an equivalent Classical Persia project for the Parthians & Sassanids... but so it goes.

Anyway, my reading of the templates and categories list at the main project page is that the current status quo is that the Hellenistic Period is a good cutting-off point of scope. Any thoughts or complaints if I were to make that more explicit? (This would also have the side effect of removing some recently added articles from the Hellenistic & Roman periods from the project - but this is good IMO, they can go in more closely related projects instead, and this one can cover Hittites / Babylonians / Assyrians / Elam / etc.) SnowFire (talk) 05:13, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Why can't certain articles be covered by two wikiprojects and templates? As far as I am aware, there is a tendency (at least in archaeological conferences) to break down these distinctions between "ancient Near Eastern" and "classical/Roman/Greek". I don't see the point in the need to divide articles exclusively between either of those two (the same goes for the decision to apparently leave out prehistory from ancient Near East). Just my two cents though. I am certainly not going to argue over this. Zoeperkoe (talk) 07:49, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Hmm, maybe I shouldn't have brought up the other WikiProject. To be clear, I'm not saying that articles can't be in multiple projects. Of course some articles will straddle the line. I'm just asking where "the line" is for this particular project (ignoring for a moment what other WikiProjects cover). Like, at risk of saying the obvious, but stuff not in the Near East isn't in scope, and presumably articles that are not in the "Ancient" Near East (the Lebanese Civil War of the 1970s & 80s or the like) obviously aren't in scope either, the question is just what is meant by "Ancient." There will certainly be some overlap, but where the overlap is will vary - if it's the Hellenistic era, then the Greco-Persian War & related articles will be in both projects, for example. I think that based on the current categories mentioned, it seems like the scope loosely stops then currently, and I think that's a good stopping point myself. SnowFire (talk) 18:21, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Well, yes, the closest thing to a consensus is that ancient in ANE means Uruk IV to the death of Alexander the great.

The former appears to be that is when people started taking this writing thing seriously. One could contend ancient could extend thousands of years earlier when they were already building cities etc or even to the Neanderthals of Shanidar Cave but that has not happened often.

The later case is harder because ancient means different things in different places. Was the Athens of Pericles fully Classical? Of course it was. In the Near East though people went on with the old ways until Alexander kicked over the apple cart (or chariot perhaps). I know, its hard to think of the Selucids as not "ancient" but really in the grand scheme of things they were classical

All that said, as Zoeperkoe stated, it's not worth fighting over. Just use your best judgement.Ploversegg (talk) 19:04, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

User script to detect unreliable sources

Main page: User:Headbomb/unreliable

I have (with the help of others) made a small user script to detect and highlight various links to unreliable sources and predatory journals. Some of you may already be familiar with it, given it is currently the 39th most imported script on Wikipedia. The idea is that it takes something like

• John Smith "Article of things" Deprecated.com. Accessed 2020-02-14. (John Smith "[https://www.deprecated.com/article Article of things]" ''Deprecated.com''. Accessed 2020-02-14.)

and turns it into something like

• John Smith "Article of things" Deprecated.com. Accessed 2020-02-14.

It will work on a variety of links, including those from {{cite web}}, {{cite journal}} and {{doi}}.

The script is mostly based on WP:RSPSOURCES, WP:NPPSG and WP:CITEWATCH and a good dose of common sense. I'm always expanding coverage and tweaking the script's logic, so general feedback and suggestions to expand coverage to other unreliable sources are always welcomed.

Do note that this is not a script to be mindlessly used, and several caveats apply. Details and instructions are available at User:Headbomb/unreliable. Questions, comments and requests can be made at User talk:Headbomb/unreliable.

- Headbomb {t · c · p · b}

This is a one time notice and can't be unsubscribed from. Delivered by: MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:00, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

The state of the Erra page

I feel like it's worth pointing out that someone has been using the page Erra (god), which is within the scope of this project, as a dumping ground for original research on barely deities, with a healthy dose of attributing own ideas to credible authors. I just raised the same point on the article's talk page. I should note the same phenomenon happened to other deity articles on a smaller scale before, and it is probably a single person at large. HaniwaEnthusiast (talk) 20:24, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

They seem to be all the same person, I thought it was just 2 IP addresses but there are more, all from Italy, some clearly the same geolocation. I checked a couple of citations which failed to back the text, semi-protected for 6 months. Doug Weller talk 14:07, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Ancient Near East studies

Hello all,

First of all: Apologies if I'm doing formatting, etiquette, etc. incorrectly; I'm not a usual Wiki user.

I just wanted to draw attention to the Ancient Near East studies page, especially the following section (not necessarily because it's the worst section, but because it's the most glaringly incomplete): Ancient Near East studies#Universities with major ANE centres

This list is not only incomplete, but also rather US-centric. The article is a mess in general, but that section stood out to me as being in particular need of some editing. Of the institutions listed, some aren't even specific to antiquity—e.g. the reference link for Columbia University leads to a library collection with connections to multiple departments at Columbia, including the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian & African Studies, but they seem to be at least as focused on the modern Near East as the ANE. Does anyone feel up to tackling that page, and especially that section?

Here are a few that I found with a quick search if anyone wants to properly format and add them:

Harvard University — Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (under which both the graduate and undergraduate programs in ANE studies are housed)

University of British Columbia — Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies

University of Chicago — Ancient Near Eastern History (from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations)

University of London SOAS — Ancient Near East

University of Minnesota — Classical & Near Eastern Religions & Cultures

University of Vienna — Ancient Near Eastern Studies

University of Wisconsin – Madison — Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies

Yale University — Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations (goes through to modernity, but houses graduate program in the Classical Near East

University of Freiburg — Near Eastern Philology

If we want to include departments that are about Near Eastern studies more generally/in modernity, but still include components related to history and antiquity:

Cornell University — Near Eastern Studies

University of Oxford — Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

University of Toronto — Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations

Near Eastern Languages & Civilization — University of Washington

I also accidentally found a few things to put under the section about Societies (which is, perhaps inappropriately, under the small section of Ancient Near East studies#History of ANE studies):

British Association for Near Eastern Archaeology

London Centre for the Ancient Near East

And a few that I wasn't sure whether to categorize under the Universities section or the Societies section, or whether to include at all; perhaps a section on museum collections or the like could be useful? I saw a number of museums advertising their ANE collections during my search:

ARCHAIA: Yale Program for the Study of Ancient and Premodern Cultures and Societies

Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East (which appears to have a Wiki as well) (similar to the Columbia University example already in the list, this is a museum collection curated and accessed by related departments at Harvard University)

University of Alberta — W.G. Hardy Collection of Ancient Near Eastern and Classical Antiquities (same as above)

University of Sydney — Centre for Classical and Near Eastern Studies of Australia

Thanks!

Kinnery (talk) 21:46, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

Lists such as these are always problematic - who's going to define what a "major centre" is? Rather than try to expand this list, I would suggest to find a way to write about this topic without resolving to "lists of major universities/journals/conferences/whatever" so that the list can be removed completely. If the list is going to be expanded, the main task should be to include some non-American institutions. There are numerous notable institutions elsewhere - Tübingen, Leiden, Lyon, Berlin... (and obviously also beyond just Europe and the US) Zoeperkoe (talk) 17:50, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Umma-Lagash war‎

Please can you look over this new article I've written? (And copyedit/improve if you can?). This isn't my area of expertise but I wanted to give it a crack. Hope you like. :)--Coin945 (talk) 18:05, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Could someone please review these two major edits concerning Ziggurats and stepped pyramids?

They may be ok, but I just don't know. Thanks. [8] and [9]. Doug Weller talk 13:55, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Kaelin is an actual Near Eastern archaeologist and the given source is from a credible publisher as well. However, it seems that this idea is more of a hypothesis/idea; the relevant part seems to be here, although I can't access the whole book. I would suggest to give this a single line at most (Author XYZ has suggested that...) instead of several paragraphs. Zoeperkoe (talk) 17:41, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

I've reverted both. On closer inspection this blurb was just a literal translation from the original German. Zoeperkoe (talk) 06:42, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Haurun

A discussion has been opened at Talk:Haurun, proposing to move the article on that deity to the title Hauron. A. Parrot (talk) 21:43, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

Tell Kunara

I did a starter article for the site Tell Kunara. Alas the available online excavation reports (linked in the article) are in French. If anyone can read French and is in the mood it would be cool if they would take a look at them and perhaps add to the article.Thanks.Ploversegg (talk) 18:38, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Himyarite or Hemyarite?

Recently Himyarite Kingdom has been moved to Hemyarite Kingdom on the grounds that the latter is "the correct name". I would be grateful for comment at Talk:Hemyarite Kingdom from people more knowledgeable on the topic than me. Furius (talk) 16:57, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

Assyriology

Hi! I found a lot of mistakes in this section about decipherment of cuneiform.

Class I, II and III are different types of cuneiform writing as defined by Carsten Niebuhr when copying trilingual inscriptions in Persepolis, Iran. Now we know that these different classes are three different languages.

Class I: Old Persian

Class II: Neo-Elamite (not Akkadian!)

Class III: Babylonian or Assyrian (Akkadian had two "dialects": Babylonian and Assyrian)... so, not Sumerian!!!!

Sumerian was at first believed to be just another way of writing Akkadian. Rawlinson understood at some point that Sumerian was a completely different language by examining bilingual syllabaries excavated at Kuyunjik (Iraq).

Contents in this article are taken from this source (Kramer): you can read by yourself. I am not an English native speaker, as you can see, so please help. :) Pequod76 (talk-ita.esp.eng) 10:54, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

Infobox issues

Recently the infoboxes of many articles of Ugaritic and/or Canaanite deities (Shahar, Shalim, Kothar-wa-Khasis, the list goes on) have been a target of disprutive editing, courtesy of a single user who seems to have a poor grasp of the purpose of these templates; in addition to the usual routine of adding equivalents based on superficial similarities with 0 concern for what sources have to say, this batch of them includes nonsensical addition of empty sections with "??" given as value. It is admiteddly difficult for a single person to keep up with similar issues - which do pop up periodically - which is why I feel this should be brought up on the project talk page. HaniwaEnthusiast (talk) 11:07, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

I took a quick look. I would say that yes, the question mark thing is not helpful. You want to keep infoboxes to the minimum necessary to hold the needed info. The equivalents thing is more nuanced. Like they added Hermes to a messenger god in the Equivalents" section which Hermes is a messenger god so that seems equivalent to me. Maybe the problem is the header. Are you thinking it should be more like "gods derived from" or some proper words for that? In mean, to the casual Wikipedia reader they ARE equivalent. So I guess I;m saying maybe the infobox structure needs to be poked to make it clearer what is meant. Unless I totally missed your point. :-) Ploversegg (talk) 14:57, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

I think the equivalents section should reflect what primary sources offer - what actually arose through Mesopotamian god lists, interpretatio graeca, and the like. Ex. Philo of Byblos uses Pontos as stand-in for Yam, not Poseidon; Shapash's equivalent rather obviously wasn't Hermes, either. They shouldn't come from imagination of random editors. HaniwaEnthusiast (talk) 18:36, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

I agree with @HaniwaEnthusiast:. "Equivalents" in these infoboxes should be restricted as much as possible. It should include equivalents that are stated in ancient texts (e.g. bilingual inscriptions and the like), and perhaps cases where gods' names are revealed by modern research to be etymological cognates (e.g. Greek Zeus and Vedic Dyaus). In either case, citations to reliable sources are necessary, of course.

The alternative of including every god that seems similar is unsustainable: there are tens of thousands of "messenger gods" in religions around the world, for example, and it would be completely impractical and unhelpful to include them all in the infoboxen. Furius (talk) 18:56, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

Actually I agree with both of you. We know there are definite processes by which deities develop from other deities (Syncretism etc). The average Wiki editor will not know this. So if you have an "Equivalents" section then sooner or later someone will say "Hey, Mercury is a messenger god too!". And given how much baseless speculation there has been about gods in the literature I'm sure they could find a source for that. So I guess what I'm saying is that is having an Equivalents field in the Infobox really worth the long term hassle? If it is, consider changing the header to maybe Derived Deities or something.Ploversegg (talk) 19:21, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

I see your point and I agree with you that we should aim for a high bar on this. I do think that the field is useful when equivalents are firmly established (e.g. Greek-Roman equivalents like Minerva = Athena, Zeus = Jupiter). I understand that the Akkadian-Sumerian-Hittite equivalents are often similarly stable and the field is probably also useful in that case. But you're right that in many cases things are complicated or disputed or speculative and that sort of information belongs in main text, not the infobox. Furius (talk) 19:59, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

I must admit I am personally not a huge fan of infoboxes and focusing on "equivalencies" in the first place, no matter how hard one tries they present a synthetic, overly simplified image of the deity. Given that we are talking about figures which often were the topic of theological speculation for thousands of years it's virtually impossible to claim they can be accurately summarized this way (try doing that with all traditions regarding Nergal's wife, or with every area of influence attributed to IShara, or with all deities ever attributed as children to Enlil, or with every deity who got to be represented by the same logogram as Ishkur without the infobox starting to look unwieldy). Simply writing a paragraph with a historical overview of related phenomena is always the better solution.

The only worse trend in the deity articles were/are family tree templates typically synthesizing completely unrelated traditions.

This is digression but I guess it saddens me greatly how often basically the only venue where some of the oldest writing of the world can reach a bigger audience also puts it at the mercy of people simply unprepared to properly engage with this sort of material. Simplifications of the sort we are discussing here are nothing compared to articles written relying on sources from the 19th century or hoaxes, sadly, and these are plentiful in ANE categories still. HaniwaEnthusiast (talk) 21:30, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

Also, on the approach to equivalents @Ploversegg mentioned - just spotted a pretty awful case of that n the ʿAṯtar article. The actually attested equivalents (Aštabi, Lugal-Marada) left out in favor of dumping every vaguely Venus-related figure there... including Amatsu-Mikaboshi. Early Japanese royal chronicles are known for their influence on bronze age Ugarit and iron age South Arabia, after all, truly a cultural koine at work. I'm honestly not sure if there is a point in even trying to keep ANE articles credible, honestly. It's virtually all I've been trying to do since the middle of 2021 but to put it lightly it does not feel like much changed, I guess. HaniwaEnthusiast (talk) 21:43, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

That's strange - I thought I had fixed that one in the last few hours; I've reverted it now. If I may, when I find myself thinking like that, it generally means that I'm approaching burn out and need to take a break for a little while. There's nothing wrong with that. On the other hand, while one is always fighting fires and there is always more to be done, the long-term trajectory really is towards improvement (however glacial). I mean, look at Aštabi - that didn't even exist two years ago! Furius (talk) 02:23, 14 January 2023 (UTC)

As Furius said, maybe take a Wiki-break, or do what I just did and take a palette cleansing trip to some other area of Wikipedia you have an interest in. I just finished a diversion in early North American archaeology, wrote a site article Cooper's Ferry site, completely redid a couple like Clovis point, and generally poked around. I'm refreshed and also got an appreciation of how good things really are in the ANE area of Wiki. Serious, it was a hot mess where I was the last couple weeks. :-)Ploversegg (talk) 03:08, 14 January 2023 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Naqiʾa#Requested move 16 January 2023

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Naqiʾa#Requested move 16 January 2023 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. UtherSRG (talk) 13:27, 16 January 2023 (UTC)