“The Just Judgements that Ḫammu-rāpi, a Former King, Rendered”: A New Royal Inscription in the Istanbul Archaeological Museums

This article publishes a royal inscription preserved on a clay tablet housed in the Istanbul Archaeological Museums. The inscription, which was intended for display on a stele, commemorates a royal grant of tax exemptions to nine Babylonian cities and presents the royal protagonist as a second Ḫammu-rāpi. The name and titulary of the king in question are not preserved, and the attribution of the inscription is accordingly uncertain. Following Jean-Vincent Scheil’s attribution of the text already in 1902, the study that accompanies an edition of the text argues that it should be attributed to Nabonidus, king of Babylon 556–539 BC, and explores its historical significance in this context

The ‘Prostration Hemerology’ Revisited: An Everyman’s Hemerology at the King’s Court

The ‘Prostration Hemerology’, with its seemingly random selection of dates and plethora of unparalleled prescriptions – such as the towing of boats upstream, the kissing of ecstatics, and the impregnating of street women –, is one of the most peculiar hemerologies in Alasdair Livingstone’s recent anthology of the genre. This article attempts a new reconstruction of the text which differs from Livingstone’s in several respects. To this end it uses eight previously unpublished manuscripts, identified in the collections of the Ancient Orient Museum of the Istanbul Archaeological Museums, the University Museum (Philadelphia), and the British Museum. Thanks to these and the collation of the other five tablets used by Livingstone, an almost complete reconstruction of the text is now possible. It reveals itself to be an influential hemerology: as well as being widely cited by scholars at the Assyrian court, it was extensively quoted in later hemerological compilations

"No harvest was reaped": demographic and climatic factors in the decline of the Neo-Assyrian Empire

Abstract In the 9th century BC, Assyrians based in northern Iraq started a relentless process of expansion that within two centuries would see them controlling most of the ancient Near East. Traditional explanations for the decline of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the 7th century BC have emphasized the role of military conflict, and especially the destruction of the Assyrian capital, Nineveh, by a coalition of Babylonian and Median forces in 612 BC. However, it remains unclear how the Assyrian state, the most powerful military machine of its age and the largest empire the Old World had ever seen up to that time, declined so quickly. In this paper, we highlight two potential factors which may have had some influence upon the Assyrian decline that have not been previously explored. The first is a major increase in the population of the Assyrian heartland area at the dawn of the 7th century BC, which substantially reduced the drought resilience of the region. The second factor is an episode of severe drought affecting large portions of the Near East during the mid-7th century BC. We propose a series of testable hypotheses which detail how the combination of these two factors may have contributed to the development of considerable economic and political instability within the Assyrian Empire, and argue that these demographic and climatic factors played a significant role in its demise

Association analysis of Glutathione S-transferase omega-1 and omega-2 genetic polymorphisms and ischemic stroke risk in a Turkish population

Objectives: Oxidative stress is a known risk factor for the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis, the main cause of ischemic stroke. Glutathione S-transferase (GST) omega-1 and omega-2, members of phase II enzymes, play a role in the antioxidant system. The single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), C419A and A424G in GST omega genes can cause a decrease in enzyme activity. The aim of this study was to investigate the possible association between these polymorphisms and ischemic stroke risk in a Turkish population. Methods: The genotypes and allele frequencies for 239 patients and 130 controls were determined by the PCR/RFLP method. No significant differences were found between patients and controls in terms of genotype and allele frequencies. Results: The frequency of the polymorphic ‘A’ allele was 0.358 in patients and 0.342 in controls for the C419A polymorphism in the GSTO1 gene. The frequency of the polymorphic ‘G’ allele for GSTO2 A424G SNP was 0.370 in patients and 0.404 in controls. The combined homozygous wild type genotype ‘CCAG’ was significantly higher in control group than in the patients. Conclusion: No significant difference was observed between the stroke patients and controls in terms of genotypes and allele distributions. Double combine haplotype CCAA was found to be protective against ischemic stroke when compare to other haplotypes. However, different genotypes of GSTO1 and GSTO2 were observed to have effects on stroke risk in subgroups of diabetics and smokers. In conclusion, the current study is the first to report this finding.Middle East Technical University Research Project Fun

The excess kurtosis of a source as a function of the relative size of the active region.

<p>A Gaussian has zero excess kurtosis. Here as in Example 2 of the original paper <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0073309#pone.0073309-Daubechies1" target="_blank">[8]</a>. The four vertical lines at correspond to the relative sizes of the small box, the medium box, the large box, and a very large box corresponding to the maximal kurtosis case. Note that the medium and large box experiments have near zero excess kurtosis, <i>i.e., kurtosis value matching that of a Gaussian</i>. In addition, the pdfs of these sources are bimodal (see inset figures), ensuring that ICA algorithms designed for unimodal super-Gaussian distributions such as Infomax and FastICA with standard parameter settings, will likely fail. At the bottom of the figure are the ISI values (see Equation (2)) for the various algorithms at those four points (see <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0073309#pone-0073309-t001" target="_blank">Table 1</a> for full list). Also note the best separation performance of Infomax and FastICA for the maximum kurtosis case, which corresponds to almost the <i>lowest</i> level of sparsity.</p

The distribution of sources and mixtures for ().

<p>We plot (A–C) the distribution of sources, and (D) the contour plot of mixtures for the case of (). Contrary to the claim made in Daubechies et al., the sources have in fact very peaky and heavy-tailed distributions and are not at all close to a Gaussian distribution. For comparison purposes we also present Gaussian distribution curves (blue, A–B).</p