If it’s summer, Joseph J. Basile (“When People Lived at Petra”) must be in Jordan, where he is associate director of the Brown University excavations of the Southern Temple at Petra. Basile chairs the Department of Art History at the Maryland Institute College of Art, in Baltimore, and is the author of “The Lower Temenos” (in Petra Great Temple, Vol. 1, ed. Martha Sharp Joukowsky [E.A. Johnson, 1999]). Tzvi Abusch (“Gilgamesh”) is the Rose and Joseph Cohen Professor of Assyriology and Ancient Near Eastern Religion at Brandeis University. He is co-editor, with Karl van der Toorn, of Mesopotamian Magic: […]