While in Sudan earlier this year, a film crew from National Geographic came to El Kurru to document our work and interview the dig director, Geoff Emberling. The fruits of their labor aired on PBS on October 1 as “Rise of the Black Pharaohs.” Here’s the PBS description: About the ProgramThe Egypt of the Great…
In January, the Boston Globe Magazine published an essay I wrote about my friendship with Mahmoud, a Sudanese archaeologist, and a greeting I had never seen before, the Sudanese Hug. The basic gesture is a right handed pat on another person’s left shoulder while they do the same to you. The Sudanese Hug is more…
The New York Times decided to follow up on my essay about Greater Boston* by commissioning an interactive map of baseball fandom based on Facebook Likes correlated with zip code. The authors write about it here. The interactive map is here. A second map based on the same data showing the second favorite team is…
What’s more than a handshake and less than a hug? The Sudanese have the answer. From the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine (1/12/14): Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce to you the Sudanese hug. While working on an archeological excavation in northern Sudan, I was fascinated by a form of greeting I had never seen…
Earlier this year, I worked on an excavation in northern Sudan. The most amazing thing we found were a couple of rock-cut rooms in a mortuary temple a hundred yards from the pyramids of the royal cemetery. In the rock-cut rooms, there were columns, and in one of them, capitals of unusual design. My contribution…
The journal Iraq, published by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq recently printed an academic article about Assyrian music that I wrote. The citation is: Cheng, Jack, “The Horizontal Forearm Harp: Assyria’s National Instrument,” Iraq 74, 2012, p. 75-87. Here’s the abstract: A horizontal harp, strung with 7 to 9 strings and usually decorated…
Ancient Near Eastern Art in Context: Studies in Honor of Irene J. Winter By Her Students, eds. Jack Cheng & Marian Feldman, (Leiden: Brill), 2007 is now accessible online for reading or download. You can find it on Scribd here: Ancient Near Eastern Art in Context: Studies in Honor of Irene J. Winter By Her…
Now online is a review I wrote of the Virtual Museum of Iraq. It’s a really beautiful, well thought out site but I hate it for reasons that become apparent in the review. Here’s the first paragraph: The Virtual Museum of Iraq serves as an excellent multimedia introduction to the history and archaeology of Iraq,…
The Journal of Near Eastern Studies has just published my article on Sumerian music (including singing and iconography). Here’s the citation and the first few hundred words: Jack Cheng, “A Review of Early Dynastic III Music: Man’s Animal Call,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies July 2009, Vol. 68, No. 3: 163-178. A review of the…
A review I wrote of “Art and Empire: Treasures from Assyria in the British Museum” has been published in the latest issue of Near Eastern Archaeology (vol. 71 #4, cover dated December 2008). It’s too late to see the show at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and the review is not online, but it was…
Jack Cheng, PhD 