Ancient Knowledge Networks

Ancient Knowledge Networks PDF Author: Eleanor Robson
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787355942
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Ancient Knowledge Networks is a book about how knowledge travels, in minds and bodies as well as in writings. It explores the forms knowledge takes and the meanings it accrues, and how these meanings are shaped by the peoples who use it.Addressing the relationships between political power, family ties, religious commitments and literate scholarship in the ancient Middle East of the first millennium BC, Eleanor Robson focuses on two regions where cuneiform script was the predominant writing medium: Assyria in the north of modern-day Syria and Iraq, and Babylonia to the south of modern-day Baghdad. She investigates how networks of knowledge enabled cuneiform intellectual culture to endure and adapt over the course of five world empires until its eventual demise in the mid-first century BC. In doing so, she also studies Assyriological and historical method, both now and over the past two centuries, asking how the field has shaped and been shaped by the academic concerns and fashions of the day. Above all, Ancient Knowledge Networks is an experiment in writing about ‘Mesopotamian science’, as it has often been known, using geographical and social approaches to bring new insights into the intellectual history of the world’s first empires.

Ancient Knowledge Networks

Ancient Knowledge Networks PDF Author: Eleanor Robson
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787355942
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ancient Knowledge Networks is a book about how knowledge travels, in minds and bodies as well as in writings. It explores the forms knowledge takes and the meanings it accrues, and how these meanings are shaped by the peoples who use it.Addressing the relationships between political power, family ties, religious commitments and literate scholarship in the ancient Middle East of the first millennium BC, Eleanor Robson focuses on two regions where cuneiform script was the predominant writing medium: Assyria in the north of modern-day Syria and Iraq, and Babylonia to the south of modern-day Baghdad. She investigates how networks of knowledge enabled cuneiform intellectual culture to endure and adapt over the course of five world empires until its eventual demise in the mid-first century BC. In doing so, she also studies Assyriological and historical method, both now and over the past two centuries, asking how the field has shaped and been shaped by the academic concerns and fashions of the day. Above all, Ancient Knowledge Networks is an experiment in writing about ‘Mesopotamian science’, as it has often been known, using geographical and social approaches to bring new insights into the intellectual history of the world’s first empires.

Curious Minds

Curious Minds PDF Author: Perry Zurn
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262547147
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
An exhilarating, genre-bending exploration of curiosity’s powerful capacity to connect ideas and people. Curious about something? Google it. Look at it. Ask a question. But is curiosity simply information seeking? According to this exhilarating, genre-bending book, what’s left out of the conventional understanding of curiosity are the wandering tracks, the weaving concepts, the knitting of ideas, and the thatching of knowledge systems—the networks, the relations between ideas and between people. Curiosity, say Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett, is a practice of connection: it connects ideas into networks of knowledge, and it connects knowers themselves, both to the knowledge they seek and to each other. Zurn and Bassett—identical twins who write that their book “represents the thought of one mind and two bodies”—harness their respective expertise in the humanities and the sciences to get irrepressibly curious about curiosity. Traipsing across literatures of antiquity and medieval science, Victorian poetry and nature essays, as well as work by writers from a variety of marginalized communities, they trace a multitudinous curiosity. They identify three styles of curiosity—the busybody, who collects stories, creating loose knowledge networks; the hunter, who hunts down secrets or discoveries, creating tight networks; and the dancer, who takes leaps of creative imagination, creating loopy ones. Investigating what happens in a curious brain, they offer an accessible account of the network neuroscience of curiosity. And they sketch out a new kind of curiosity-centric and inclusive education that embraces everyone’s curiosity. The book performs the very curiosity that it describes, inviting readers to participate—to be curious with the book and not simply about it.

The Origins of Higher Learning

The Origins of Higher Learning PDF Author: Roy Lowe
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317543270
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Higher education has become a worldwide phenomenon where students now travel internationally to pursue courses and careers, not simply as a global enterprise, but as a network of worldwide interconnections. The Origins of Higher Learning: Knowledge networks and the early development of universities is an account of the first globalisation that has led us to this point, telling of how humankind first developed centres of higher learning across the vast landmass from the Atlantic to the China Sea. This book opens a much-needed debate on the origins of higher learning, exploring how, why and where humankind first began to take a sustained interest in questions that went beyond daily survival. Showing how these concerns became institutionalised and how knowledge came to be transferred from place to place, this book explores important aspects of the forerunners of globalisation. It is a narrative which covers much of Asia, North Africa and Europe, many parts of which were little known beyond their own boundaries. Spanning from the earliest civilisations to the end of the European Middle Ages, around 700 years ago, here the authors set out crucial findings for future research and investigation. This book shows how interconnections across continents are nothing new and that in reality, humankind has been interdependent for a much longer period than is widely recognised. It is a book which challenges existing accounts of the origins of higher learning in Europe and will be of interest to all those who wish to know more about the world of academia.

Knowledge Networks and Craft Traditions in the Ancient World

Knowledge Networks and Craft Traditions in the Ancient World PDF Author: Katharina Rebay-Salisbury
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135014442
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
This edited volume investigates knowledge networks based on materials and associated technologies in Prehistoric Europe and the Classical Mediterranean. It emphasises the significance of material objects to the construction, maintenance, and collapse of networks of various forms – which are central to explanations of cultural contact and change. Focusing on the materiality of objects and on the way in which materials are used adds a multidimensional quality to networks. The properties, functions, and styles of different materials are intrinsically linked to the way in which knowledge flows and technologies are transmitted. Transmission of technologies from one craft to another is one of the main drivers of innovation, whilst sharing knowledge is enabled and limited by the extent of associated social networks in place. Archaeological research has often been limited to studying objects made of one particular material in depth, be it lithic materials, ceramics, textiles, glass, metal, wood or others. The knowledge flow and transfer between crafts that deal with different materials have often been overlooked. This book takes a fresh approach to the reconstruction of knowledge networks by integrating two or more craft traditions in each of its chapters. The authors, well-known experts and early career researchers, provide concise case studies that cover a wide range of materials. The scope of the book extends from networks of craft traditions to implications for society in a wider sense: materials, objects, and the technologies used to make and distribute them are interwoven with social meaning. People make objects, but objects make people – the materiality of objects shapes our understanding of the world and our place within it. In this book, objects are treated as clues to social networks of different sorts that can be contrasted and compared, both spatially and diachronically.

Revolutionizing a World

Revolutionizing a World PDF Author: Mark Altaweel
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1911576658
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
This book investigates the long-term continuity of large-scale states and empires, and its effect on the Near East’s social fabric, including the fundamental changes that occurred to major social institutions. Its geographical coverage spans, from east to west, modern-day Libya and Egypt to Central Asia, and from north to south, Anatolia to southern Arabia, incorporating modern-day Oman and Yemen. Its temporal coverage spans from the late eighth century BCE to the seventh century CE during the rise of Islam and collapse of the Sasanian Empire. The authors argue that the persistence of large states and empires starting in the eighth/seventh centuries BCE, which continued for many centuries, led to new socio-political structures and institutions emerging in the Near East. The primary processes that enabled this emergence were large-scale and long-distance movements, or population migrations. These patterns of social developments are analysed under different aspects: settlement patterns, urban structure, material culture, trade, governance, language spread and religion, all pointing at movement as the main catalyst for social change. This book’s argument is framed within a larger theoretical framework termed as ‘universalism’, a theory that explains many of the social transformations that happened to societies in the Near East, starting from the Neo-Assyrian period and continuing for centuries. Among other influences, the effects of these transformations are today manifested in modern languages, concepts of government, universal religions and monetized and globalized economies.

Things that Travelled

Things that Travelled PDF Author: Daniela Rosenow
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787351173
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
Recent research has demonstrated that, in the Roman, Late Antique, Early Islamic and Medieval worlds, glass was traded over long distances, from the Eastern Mediterranean, mainly Egypt and Israel, to Northern Africa, the Western Mediterranean and Northern Europe. Things that Travelled, a collaboration between the UCL Early Glass Technology Research Network, the Association for the History of Glass and the British Museum, aims to build on this knowledge. Covering all aspects of glass production, technology, distribution and trade in Roman, Byzantine and Early Medieval/Early Islamic times, including studies from Britain, Egypt, Cyprus, Italy and many others, the volume combines the strengths of the sciences and cultural studies to offer a new approach to research on ancient glass. By bringing together such a varied mix of contributors, specialising in a range of geographical areas and chronological time frames, this volume also offers a valuable contribution to broader discussions on glass within political, economic, cultural and historical arenas.

Before Nature

Before Nature PDF Author: Francesca Rochberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022640627X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
In the modern West, we take for granted that what we call the “natural world” confronts us all and always has—but Before Nature explores that almost unimaginable time when there was no such conception of “nature”—no word, reference, or sense for it. Before the concept of nature formed over the long history of European philosophy and science, our ancestors in ancient Assyria and Babylonia developed an inquiry into the world in a way that is kindred to our modern science. With Before Nature, Francesca Rochberg explores that Assyro-Babylonian knowledge tradition and shows how it relates to the entire history of science. From a modern, Western perspective, a world not conceived somehow within the framework of physical nature is difficult—if not impossible—to imagine. Yet, as Rochberg lays out, ancient investigations of regularity and irregularity, norms and anomalies clearly established an axis of knowledge between the knower and an intelligible, ordered world. Rochberg is the first scholar to make a case for how exactly we can understand cuneiform knowledge, observation, prediction, and explanation in relation to science—without recourse to later ideas of nature. Systematically examining the whole of Mesopotamian science with a distinctive historical and methodological approach, Before Nature will open up surprising new pathways for studying the history of science.

The Wealth of Networks

The Wealth of Networks PDF Author: Yochai Benkler
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300125771
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description
Describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing. The author shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people create and express themselves. He describes the range of legal and policy choices that confront.

The Dutch Trading Companies As Knowledge Networks

The Dutch Trading Companies As Knowledge Networks PDF Author: Siegfried Huigen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900418659X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
For more than a century, from about 1600 until the early eighteenth century, the Dutch dominated world trade. Via the Netherlands the far reaches of the world, both in the Atlantic and in the East, were connected. Dutch ships carried goods, but they also opened up opportunities for the exchange of knowledge. The commercial networks of the Dutch trading companies provided an infrastructure which was accessible to people with a scholarly interest in the exotic world. The present collection of essays brings together a number of studies about knowledge construction that depended on the Dutch trading networks. Contributors include: Paul Arblaster, Hans den Besten, Frans Blom, Britt Dams, Adrien Delmas, Alette Fleischer, Antje Flüchter, Michiel van Groesen, Henk de Groot, Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Grégoire Holtz, Siegfried Huigen, Elspeth Jajdelska, Maria-Theresia Leuker, Edwin van Meerkerk, Bruno Naarden, and Christina Skott.

Everything Ancient Was Once New

Everything Ancient Was Once New PDF Author: Emalani Case
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824886801
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
In Everything Ancient Was Once New, Emalani Case explores Indigenous persistence through the concept of Kahiki, a term that is at once both an ancestral homeland for Kānaka Maoli (Hawaiians) and the knowledge that there is life to be found beyond Hawaiʻi’s shores. Kahiki is therefore both a symbol of ancestral connection and the potential that comes with remembering and acting upon that connection. Tracing physical, historical, intellectual, and spiritual journeys to and from Kahiki, Case frames it as a place of refuge and sanctuary, a place where ancient knowledge can constantly be made anew. It is in Kahiki, and in the sanctuary it creates, that today’s Kānaka Maoli can find safety and reprieve from the continued onslaught of settler colonial violence while confronting some of the uncomfortable and challenging realities of being Indigenous in Hawaiʻi, in the Pacific, and in the world. The book engages with Kahiki as a shifting term employed by Kānaka Maoli to explain their lives and experiences at different points in history. Case argues for reactivated and reinvigorated engagements with Kahiki to support ongoing work aimed at decolonizing physical and ideological spaces and to reconnect Kānaka Maoli to peoples and places in the Pacific region and beyond in purposeful, meaningful ways. By tracing Kahiki through pivotal moments in history and critical moments in contemporary times, Case demonstrates how the idea of Kahiki—while not always mentioned by name—was, and is, always full of potential. Intertwining personal narrative with rigorous research and analysis, Case weaves the past and the present together, reflecting on ancient concepts and their continued relevance in movements to protect lands, waters, and oceans; to fight for social justice; to reexamine our responsibilities to each other across the Pacific region; and to open space for continued dialogue on what it means to be Indigenous when at home and when away. Everything Ancient Was Once New journeys to and from Kahiki, offering readers a sanctuary for reflection, deep learning, and continued dreaming with the past, in the present, and far into the future.