From the UCLA Newsroom:

If she actually existed, the Queen of Sheba may have been African. Then again, she could have been Arab. While she may have been from Yemen, near today’s city of Ma’rib, she probably was also active in Ethiopia, near the modern city of Aksum. But so far, archaeologists have not found a tomb, palace or temple that can be definitively attributed to the prominent figure from the Hebrew Bible and the Quran. "We know there was an empire that spanned about 1,000 years and had many queens and kings," said Michael Harrower, a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. "But we don’t have archaeological evidence for a specific queen that we can say was Sheba. In fact, the biblical character may be a compilation or summary of history of the time." But if archaeology so far has not uncovered the historic Sheba, it has made considerable headway in understanding the 3,000-year-old empire that archaeologists call the Kingdom of Saba — the Arabic name for "Sheba" — whose location and era are consistent with biblical accounts of the queen. On Saturday, April 3, the Cotsen Institute will present a talk at which Harrower and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory principal scientist Ronald Blom will discuss these findings. The free event, which is open to the public, begins at 2 p.m. in the Lenart Auditorium of the Fowler Museum at UCLA, on the Westwood campus. Parking is available in Lot 4 for $10. Showcasing the latest advancements in satellite imagery and computer mapping, "The Ancient Universe of the Queen of Sheba" will explore a 200,000-square-mile-area, stretching east from Ethiopia across the Red Sea into Yemen and Oman on the southern Arabian Peninsula. Topics will include the Kingdom of Saba’s impressive irrigation system, its coveted reserves of frankincense and its long-distance trade routes to the Mediterranean.

The news release continues here.  More information is here.

Evidence of Jewish exiles living in Babylon in the 6th-5th centuries BC will be the subject of a conference at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.  From Newswise:

Saint Joseph’s University’s Ancient Studies program is sponsoring a conference focusing on a collection of recently discovered documents that shed light on a Jewish settlement in ancient Mesopotamia. “Jerusalem in Babylonia: New Discoveries from the Exilic Period,” will be held March 21-22 in the University’s Campion Student Center.
The cuneiform documents date from the fifth and sixth centuries BCE, and are referred to as the “Al-Yahuda texts,” based on the name of the place where the documents themselves say they were drawn up.
“The phrase ‘Al-Yahuda’ means ‘city of Judah,’ which in the Bible refers to Jerusalem,” said Bruce Wells, Ph.D., director of the Ancient Studies program and an assistant professor of theology.
What makes the documents so noteworthy, however, is that they weren’t discovered in Jerusalem. They were found in modern day Iraq, in the territory that was known as Babylonia at the time they were written. That time was the so-called “exilic period” when a number of people from Judah (the southern part of modern day Israel) were taken as captives to Babylonia.
[…]
The conference, which is co-sponsored by SJU’s Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations and Department of Theology, is free and open to the public. It will be held on March 21 from 1:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. and March 22 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Read the article or see the university’s website for more information and contact details.

HT: Yehuda News

Aren Maeir, excavator of Philistine Gath, will be lecturing in New England next week.  From his blog:

On Wednesday, March 3rd, I will be giving two lectures at Brandeis University. The first one, entitled: “The Archaeology of Love and Sex in the Ancient Near East” will be from 2:10 – 3:30 pm at Lown 202, as part of Prof. M. Brettler’s class “The Song of Songs”. The second one, entitled: “Canaanites, Philistines, Israelites and Crusaders: The Excavations at Tell es-Safi/Gath, Israel” will from 5:10 – 6:30 pm at Lown 2, as part of a joint lecture for the Depts. of Anthropology and of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies. On Thursday, March 4th, I’ll be presenting a lecture at the Laboratory for Engineering Man/Machine Systems at Brown University, on the excavations at Tell es-Safi/Gath. If anyone is in the area, please do feel free to come to these talks.

These sound interesting!