Open access series: SBL Ancient Near East Monographs

Here's the introductory paragraph of this new resource:

http://www.sbl-site.org/publications/Books_ANEmonographs.aspx

The focus of this ambitious series is on the ancient Near East, including ancient Israel and its literature, from the early Neolithic to the early Hellenistic eras. Studies that are heavily philological or archaeological are both suited to this series, and can take full advantage of the hypertext capabilities of “born digital” publication. Multiple author and edited volumes as well as monographs are accepted. Proposals and manuscripts may be submitted in either English or Spanish. Manuscripts are peer reviewed by at least two scholars in the area before acceptance. Published volumes will be held to the high scholarly standards of the SBL and the Centro de Estudios de Historia del Antiguo Oriente. The partnership between the SBL and the Centro de Estudios de Historia del Antiguo Oriente was initiated under the auspices of SBL’s International Cooperation Initiative (ICI) and represents the type of international scholarly exchange that is the goal of ICI.

This series is the ideal place to publish for authors and editors who wish their work to be widely read. Works published in the series are (and will remain permanently) open access. This ensures the widest possible readership for these works.

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Thus far three monographs have been published, two in Spanish (one dealing with the relationship between the Negeb and Egypt, Asia, and the Levant; the other on Egypt and Asia) and one in English (Lenzi's Reading Akkadian Hymns and Prayers: An Introduction, http://www.sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/9781589835962.pdf )

ANE sites on Google Earth

Uppsala University has done the scholarly community a great service by tagging a staggering number of ANE sites to Google Earth.

http://www.anst.uu.se/olofpede/Links

Dorot Foundation digitized scans of some Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dorot Foundation is in the process of digitizing the collection of the DSS at the Shrine of the Book museum in Jerusalem. At present only three scrolls are available (the Aleppo Codex, Isaiah Scroll, and Temple Scroll), but the Foundation has done an impressive job. Clicking the link to the Isaiah and Temple Scrolls produces a scan in which shows the scrolls as one would read them in a synagogue, i.e. they are partially open. At the bottom of the window is a button, which by moving to the left or right, moves the scroll either frontwards or backwards. Similarly, the Aleppo Codex appears as a book, and clicking a button advances or retreats through it leaf by leaf. There's also an option for zooming, but it is fairly limited.

http://www.imj.org.il/shrine_center/

American Archaeology Abroad

This website is from a non-profit group that excavates in the Near East/West Asia. It is oriented towards scholars, students, and the public.

http://www.americanarchaeologyabroad.org/

The Friedberg Cairo Geniza Project

Those interested in accessing digital images of the Cairo Geniza will be glad to know that the Friedberg Genizah Project has a website with scans of this eclectic corpus, e.g., biblical and extrabiblical texts and even recipes for Kosher cheese.

http://www.genizah.org/index.htm

Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period

Here's in introductory information from the homepage about this important open-access resource:

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/

Numerous royally commissioned texts were composed between 744 BC and 669 BC, a period during which Assyria became the dominant power in southwestern Asia. Six hundred to six hundred and fifty such inscriptions are known today. The Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period (RINAP) Project, under the direction of Professor Grant Frame of the University of Pennsylvania, will publish in print and online all of the known royal inscriptions that were composed during the reigns of the Assyrian kings Tiglath-pileser III (744-727 BC), Shalmaneser V (726-722 BC), Sargon II (721-705 BC), Sennacherib (704-681 BC), and Esarhaddon (680-669 BC), rulers whose deeds were also recorded in the Bible and in some classical sources. The individual texts range from short one-line labels to lengthy, detailed inscriptions with over 500 lines (2500 words) of text.

These Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions (744-669 BC) represent only a small, but important part of the vast Neo-Assyrian text corpus. They are written in the Standard Babylonian dialect of Akkadian and provide valuable insight into royal exploits, both on the battlefield and at home, royal ideology, and Assyrian religion. Most of our understanding of the political history of Assyria, and to some extent of Babylonia, comes from these sources. Because this large corpus of texts has not previously been published in one place, the RINAP Project will provide up-to-date editions (with English translations) of Assyrian royal inscriptions from the reign of Tiglath-pileser III (744-727 BC) to the reign of Esarhaddon (680-669 BC) in five print volumes and online, in a fully lemmatized and indexed format. The aim of the project is to make this vast text corpus easily accessible to scholars, students, and the general public. RINAP Online will allow those interested in Assyrian culture, history, language, religion, and texts to efficiently search Akkadian and Sumerian words appearing in the inscriptions and English words used in the translations. Project data will be fully integrated into the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) and the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc).

The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the RINAP Project research grants in 2008 and in 2010 to help carry out its work. The publications of the RINAP Project are modeled on those of the now-defunct Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia (RIM) Project and carry on where its Assyrian Periods sub-series (RIMA) ended.

Journal: Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception

This homepage of this new open-access journal reads thus:

relegere, v. to go over again in reading, speech, or thought; to read, relate or recite again

Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception is an independent, open-access, peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of innovative research in reception history, broadly conceived, within and across religious traditions.

http://relegere.org/index.php/relegere/index

Bibliography search engine: BiBIL

Biblical Bibliography of Lausanne (BiBIL) is now open access:

http://www3.unil.ch/bibil/public/

It features a standard and advanced search line for English, Hebrew, and Greek characters, and one can search in French, English, and German. Moreover, one can set limiters including books, series, journals, articles, and electronic media such as CD-roms.

My initial impression is very favorable: a search on author name "Richter" returned 63 hits.

partially open access journal: Archaeology

The Archaeological Institute of America has made partial open access to its journal Archaeology Magazine:

http://www.archaeology.org/

The magazine features articles from archaeology across the globe.

Australian Biblical Review

Some issues of Australian Biblical Review are now open access:
http://www.fbs.org.au/abr.html

Information from the home page:
Australian Biblical Review is published by the Fellowship for Biblical Studies Inc. and, since 1951, has provided a forum for biblical scholars to make their research available to the international scholarly community.

Although the majority of articles published are from Australian biblical scholars, issues include contributions from non-Australian authors, and many important contributions to biblical scholarship have been published in ABR over the years by scholars from around the world.

Australian Biblical Review is published annually in October. It has a wide international readership and can be found in the great majority of theological libraries that have a good holding of journals of biblical scholarship. ABR is a refereed journal.

2 new open access Hebrew grammars

John A. Cook and Robert D. Holmstedt have kindly made freely available two Hebrew grammars.

The first is Biblical Hebrew: A Student Grammar (Draft Copy, 2009)
http://individual.utoronto.ca/holmstedt/textbook/BHSG2011.pdf

This book contains 30 lessens, which represents the number of weeks in a typical US university academic year.

The second is Biblical Hebrew: An Illustrated Introduction
As with the former volume, this text adopts a non-confessional stance and seeks to streamline the grammar to the essentials, leaving it to the instructor to answer questions which students may raise over the lacunae. One example is that it has no formal discussion of weak verbs. Rather this topic is "relegated" to an appendix. It seems to me that the truly unique aspect is coupling the lessons with exercises that have color cartoons and ask students to answer questions based on it. Thus it introduces a visual dimension that may well enhance comprehension. The book has 50 lessons and 13 readings.

This book has two PDF downloads:

Lessons, Appendices, & Glossaries
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8477225/Textbook/BHII_Lessons_July2011.pdf

Readings
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8477225/Textbook/BHII_Readings_July2011.pdf

Their website also announces an instructor's edition to be released this summer as well as information on how to access high-resolution versions.
http://ancienthebrewgrammar.wordpress.com/2011/07/03/hebrew-textbooks-update-2/

New open access journal: NEMO

NEMO stands for Near-Eastern Musicology Online. Here's a description from the website:

http://nemo-online.org/archives/15

NEMO addresses traditional and contemporary forms of music from the Near and Middle East in the widest sense of the term as well as other forms that may enrich our initial goal. Fields covered extend from archaeomusicology to analytical musicology, including historical, educational, ethnomusicological, anthropological, etc., aspects of it.

Free access to ZAW in July 2011

Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft has a deal this month, viz. free access to all of its articles. To register, go to:
http://www.degruyter.com/journals/zaw/detailEn.cfm

The Archaeological News Network

From AWOL:

The Archaeology News Network is a non-profit daily updated online newspaper featuring all the latest stories and headlines relating primarily to Archaeology, Anthropology and Paleontology published on the World Wide Web.

We track and aggregate news items by their published dates, giving full credit to their respective authors and newspapers/journals from which they have been sourced.

Please note that the full copyright of all articles and photographs published on this site remains the exclusive property of the authors, photographers and organizations cited as the primary sources found below each post and may not be reproduced or republished without their express permission.

The website aggregates publications from the three disciplines from all over the world, but it is searchable.

http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/