Like a few million other people, I went to see the new movie Wonder Woman soon after it came out. Like a few hundred other people, I’ve taken a course in the Sumerian language and was surprised when, as a minor plot point, our heroine reads a few lines of that ancient tongue. So I wrote…
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…
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…
I have two new posts up at The Public Humanist. The first is on the traveling British Museum exhibition of Assyrian art, Art and Empire. The second is on the announcement of the Iraq Heritage Project. Please comment on both or either. I’m very curious to know what others think about these topics.
Babylon’s Ark by Lawrence Anthony is a memoir of a conservationist’s trip to Baghdad soon after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to save the animals at the Baghdad Zoo. After reading a number of books on the topic, mostly on the archaeological looting, but also the excellent Imperial Life in the Emerald City, as…
Five years ago this week, I had a small piece about the looting of the Baghdad Museum published in the Ideas section of the Boston Globe.
Well, turns out people better informed than me also think that Moqtada al-Sadr is one of the central figures in Iraq, marginalized by the Iraqi and American governments (as well as the American media). Here’s a post with the last chapter of Patrick Cockburn’s new book Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle…
Is it just me, or is it clear to everyone who the winner of the war in Iraq is? Is it just a matter of time before he’s identified by everyone else? I’m writing, of course, about Moqtada al-Sadr. He and his Mahdi army have been powerful forces and power brokers for a long time.…
Jack Cheng, PhD 