D. Happel, I. Reiten and S. Smalø initiated an investigation of quasitilted artin <inline-formula content-type="math/mathml"> <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" alttext="upper K"> <mml:semantics> <mml:mi>K</mml:mi> <mml:annotation encoding="application/x-tex">K</mml:annotation> </mml:semantics> </mml:math> </inline-formula> -algebras that are the endomorphism rings of tilting objects in hereditary abelian categories whose Hom and Ext groups are all finitely generated over a commutative artinian ring <inline-formula content-type="math/mathml"> <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" alttext="upper K"> <mml:semantics> <mml:mi>K</mml:mi> <mml:annotation encoding="application/x-tex">K</mml:annotation> </mml:semantics> </mml:math> </inline-formula> . Here, employing a notion of <inline-formula content-type="math/mathml"> <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" alttext="asterisk"> <mml:semantics> <mml:mo> ∗ </mml:mo> <mml:annotation encoding="application/x-tex">\ast</mml:annotation> </mml:semantics> </mml:math> </inline-formula> -objects, tilting objects in arbitrary abelian categories are defined and are shown to yield a version of the classical tilting theorem between the category and the category of modules over their endomorphism rings. This leads to a module theoretic notion of quasitilted rings and their characterization as endomorphism rings of tilting objects in hereditary cocomplete abelian categories.