Israel Oriental Studies (formerly IOS, now abbreviated as IOSA) is an annual devoted to the study of the Middle East in various disciplines. It began its appearance in 1971 under the auspices of the Faculty of Humanities at Tel Aviv University, and quickly earned a reputation for its contribution to scholarship, especially in the study of ancient Near Eastern and Middle Eastern languages, philology, history and religions. As such, Israel Oriental Studies has never been confined to the study of Near Eastern cultures in the narrow sense, but has encompassed the entire world of the Mediterranean. Thus, studies on medieval Spanish literature, Arabic linguistics in North Africa, Jewish and other societies in Italy and Greece, have been included in various volumes of the annual.
In its first years, between 1971 and 1975, under the editorship of a joint editorial board with M.J. Kister of Jerusalem as chairman, Israel Oriental Studies volumes were devoted mainly to Semitic Linguistics and Islamic studies. This trend has been maintained, with an inclination to linguistic studies under the editorship of Gideon Goldenberg (1976–1980). Starting in 1980 (still under G. Goldenberg; volumes 11–15 under the editorship of Joel L. Kramer; volumes 16–20 under the editorship of Shlomo Izre’el), there was a growing tendency to devote each volume of IOS to a different topic, with the exception of volumes 12 and 13, which followed the previous trend towards Islamic studies and Semitic linguistics. Thus, volume 10 (1980) was devoted to the study of “Religion and Government in the World of Islam”; volume 11 (1991) to “Studies in Medieval Arabic and Hebrew Poetics”; volume 14 (1994) to “Concepts of the Other in Near Eastern Religions”, volume 15 (1995) to “Language and Culture in the Near East”; volume 16 (1996) to “Studies in Modern Semitic Languages”; volume 17 (1997) to studies on “Dhimmis and Others: Jews and Christians and the World of Classical Islam”; volume 18 (1998) to “Past Links: Studies in the Languages and Cultures of the Ancient Near East”. Within the same trend, volume 19 (published in 1999) was devoted to Arabic literature and language, and named “Compilation and Creation in Adab and Luga: Studies in Memory of Naphtali Kinberg (1948–1997)”. Volume 20 (2002) represented the state of the art of Semitic Linguistics at the turn of the 21st century. Volumes 1–9 were published by the Faculty of the Humanities at Tel Aviv University, Volumes 10–16 appeared in Brill; and Volumes 17–20 in Eisenbrauns.
Under the aegis of the Chaim Rosenberg School of Jewish Studies and Archaeology of the Faculty of the Humanities, Tel Aviv University, as of this volume, number 21, the IOS Annual renews its publication, returning to its former home in Brill.
We plan in our future volumes, as in the current volume, to include three broad sections, the Ancient Near East, Semitic Linguistics and Arabic and Arabic Literature.
The Ancient Near Eastern Section will hold articles relating to the cultures of the pre-Islamic Near East, in general, Cuneiform Studies (Assyriology and Hittitology) and Egyptology. Topics will include languages, religion, history, and culture. Articles will range from text editions and traditional philology to digital humanities and big-data in ancient corpora. Contact and mutual influence, linguistic and cultural, between ancient Egypt and the African and Middle Eastern Semitic world are also subjects within the purview of our annual. The common Afroasiatic and Mediterranean inheritance between Egypt and the Semitic world will also be studied, allowing extensive linguistic and historical surveys of Africa and the ancient and late-ancient Mediterranean space.
The Semitic Linguistics Section will publish papers on original, innovative research of all branches of the Semitic linguistic family, also considering their Afroasiatic background. The section will be open to different linguistic approaches: from the more traditional historical and comparative methods, to cognition, semantics, pragmatics, corpus linguistics, linguistic anthropology, psycholinguistics and discourse analysis. The openness to contemporary linguistic approaches will render the section to be a unique platform for the young generations of Semitists, attracting scholars of spoken/modern Semitic languages who must address platforms of general linguistics, often not suitable for specialists of Semitic and Afroasiatic languages, as they do not strictly follow traditional historical and philological models.
The Arabic Language and Literature Section will contain original articles on classical and contemporary Arabic linguistics and literature, with a particular stress on the medieval Arabic linguistic and literary traditions, their relations with other disciplines and cultures, and their modern offshoots. Judeo–Arabic studies are also to be included, as the Annual wishes to sharpen the focus on the plethora of minority languages spoken and written in the Jewish diaspora across the Arabic speaking world, with special attention to their socio-linguistic and cultural milieus as well as to their ancient and novel written production. Judeo-Arabic languages are particularly important for the reconstruction of the history of Arabic from the dialectological perspective, as they often represent caskets of ancestral linguistic elements of the pre-Islamic Arabic facies, as they are also fundamental for the philological study of the transmission of ancient philosophical, magical, mystical and proto-scientific doctrines through the Middle Ages, between the Latin and Arab worlds. Judeo Arabic languages are now considered threatened with extinction and Israel has become a receptacle for the last native speakers since the mid-twentieth century, offering a privileged field for human, historical, literary and linguistic investigations, throughout their more recent evolutions.
The Editors welcome original studies in the languages, philology, histories and religions of the ancient Near East and the wider Mediterranean World, stretching from Central Asia to the Maghreb and the Horn of Africa. We invite scholars of the ancient Near East and related fields, such as Biblical Studies, the Classics, and Archaeology of Mesopotamia, the Levant and the Mediterranean, scholars of Semitic and Afroasiatic languages and cultures, and scholars of Arabic, Arabic linguistics, socio-linguistics and dialectology, Arabic philology, philosophy and literature to send in their contributions to the IOS Annual and enhance our study and knowledge of the languages, philology, histories and religions of the ancient Near East and Middle East throughout the ages in their wider Mediterranean Context.
Information about in-house style and submitting a contribution can be found at
Volume 21 is arranged according to three sections—the Ancient Near East, Semitics, and Arabic Language and Literature, and includes sixteen articles. In the Ancient Near East section, are studies devoted to Babylonian literature (Gabbay and Wasserman; Ayali-Darshan), history (Cohen and Torrecilla), and language (Zadok).
The Semitic section includes discussion about comparative Semitics–Egyptian and Modern South Arabic (Borg; Cerqueglini), Aramaic dialects (Khan; Stadel), Palestinian Arabic (Arnold; Procházka), and Tigre and Ethiosemitic languages (Voigt).
The final section of Arabic Language and Literature is devoted to ʿArabiyya and its grammarians (Dror; Versteegh; Sheyhatovitch; Kasher; Sadan).
The title of the volume “Carrying a Torch to Distant Mountains” is taken from the opening line of an Old Babylonian incantation edited here for the first time (Gabbay and Wasserman). The title stands as an epithet to the commitment of our Annual to continue carrying the torch of scholarship into the different regions and time periods of the Middle East, and by so illuminate its rich and diverse cultural, linguistic, and historical past heritage and current significance.
This volume is dedicated to the memory of three major contributors to the IOS Annual, Gideon Goldenberg (1930–2013), Anson Rainey (1930–2011), and Itamar Singer (1946–2012).
Editor-in-Chief
Yoram Cohen
Section Editors
Amir Gilan, The ancient Near East
Letizia Cerqueglini, Semitic Languages and Linguistics
Beata Sheyhatovitch, Arabic Language and Literature