The Melammu Project, founded in 1998, organized five successive
conferences and a sixth in 2008. Melammu Symposia 7 now represents a new
dawn for the project publishing the contributions of the meeting in
Obergurgl in November 2013. This time it will not be an isolated event:
Further conferences have already taken place and been planned (Kiel
2014, Helsinki and Tartu 2015, Kassel 2016, and Beirut 2017), the
project board has been renewed, reinvigorated and rejuvenated, and plans
are underway for a thorough reworking and updating of the project
database. Its focus (now slightly reworded to be somewhat wider) is to
investigate the continuity, transformation and diffusion of Mesopotamian
and Ancient Near Eastern culture from the third millennium BCE through
the ancient world until Islamic times (quoted from the Melammu Project
website). Of course, Mesopotamia was not the source of all culture; but
it was an important area in ancient history, that without doubt deserves
such a project, dedicated to the study of its cultural impact and
heritage. This volume assembles 42 contributions devoted to the topics
Prayers and Incantations, Foreign Reception of Mesopotamian Objects, The
Use of Literary Figures of Speech, Mesopotamia and the World, The World
of Politics, Iran and Early Islam, and Representations of Power.