In The Young Descartes, Professor Harold J. Cook tells the story of a man who did not set out to become an author or philosopher—René Descartes began publishing only after the age of forty.

Professor Stephen Houston, Dupee Family Professor of Social Science and former Director of the Program in Early Cultures, was interviewed by the BBC regarding the discovery of more than 60,000 hidden Maya ruins in Guatemala through the use of Lidar technology. The full story, "Sprawling Maya Network Discovered under Guatemala Jungle," is on BBC's website.

The Cuneiform Uranology Texts: Drawing the Constellations, by Paul-Alain Beaulieu, Eckart Frahm, Wayne Horowitz, and Professor John Steele presents a newly recovered group of cuneiform texts from first millennium Babylonia and Assyria that provide prose descriptions of the drawing (eṣēru) of Mesopotamian constellations.

The topics of the articles in Studies on the Ancient Exact Sciences in Honour of Lis Brack-Bernsen, edited by Professor John Steele and Mathieu Ossendrijver, are linked by the themes that have been at the center of much of Lis Brack-Bernsen’s own work: the Babylonian observational record, and the relationship between observation and theory; the gnomon, sundials, and time measurement; and the relationship between different scientific activities in the ancient world, especially the connections between mathematics and astronomy.

Violence and Power in Ancient Egypt, by Associate Professor Laurel Bestock, examines the use of Egyptian pictures of violence prior to the New Kingdom.

Rising Time Schemes in Babylonian Astronomy, by Professor John Steele, examines an approach from ancient astronomy to what was then a particularly important question, namely that of understanding the relationship between the position in the ecliptic and the time it takes for a fixed-length of the ecliptic beginning at that point to rise above the eastern horizon.

Knowing Bodies, Passionate Souls: Sense Perceptions in Byzantium was edited by Professor Susan Ashbrook Harvey and Margaret Mullett and published by Harvard University Press in October 2017, as part of its Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Symposia and Colloquia series.

In Friendship in the Hebrew Bible, Professor Saul M. Olyan analyzes a wide range of texts, including prose narratives, prophetic materials, psalms, pre-Hellenistic wisdom collections, and the Hellenistic-era wisdom book Ben Sira.

On Human Bondage, edited by Professor John Bodel and Walter Scheidel, is a critical reexamination of Orlando Patterson’s groundbreaking Slavery and Social Death, assessing how his theories have stood the test of time and applies them to new case studies.

Cultural Contact and Appropriation in the Axial-Age Mediterranean World: A Periplos, edited by Baruch Halpern and Professor Kenneth Sacks explores adaptation, resistance and reciprocity in Axial-Age Mediterranean exchange (ca. 800-300 BCE).