In Ties That Bind: Art and Society in the Ancient Near East, Professor Marian Feldman examines prestigious luxury items that circulated among the courts of the eastern Mediterranean and Near East during the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE. Exploring the visual hybridity presented by these objects, Feldman suggests the fundamental importance of material objects as the physical embodiment of intangible human relations. Feldman’s topic thus intersects with broader questions of identity, ethnicity, social and foreign relations, and the mediating role of material culture. In the ancient Near East, with its unique corpus of texts, archaeology, and artifacts, she seeks to ground broad insights on the dynamics between art and society