Archaeology of Babel

Archaeology of Babel PDF Author: Siraj Ahmed
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503604047
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
For more than three decades, preeminent scholars in comparative literature and postcolonial studies have called for a return to philology as the indispensable basis of critical method in the humanities. Against such calls, this book argues that the privilege philology has always enjoyed within the modern humanities silently reinforces a colonial hierarchy. In fact, each of philology's foundational innovations originally served British rule in India. Tracing an unacknowledged history that extends from British Orientalist Sir William Jones to Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said and beyond, Archaeology of Babel excavates the epistemic transformation that was engendered on a global scale by the colonial reconstruction of native languages, literatures, and law. In the process, it reveals the extent to which even postcolonial studies and European philosophy—not to mention discourses as disparate as Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu nationalism, and global environmentalism—are the progeny of colonial rule. Going further, it unearths the alternate concepts of language and literature that were lost along the way and issues its own call for humanists to reckon with the politics of the philological practices to which they now return.

Archaeology of Babel

Archaeology of Babel PDF Author: Siraj Ahmed
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503604047
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
For more than three decades, preeminent scholars in comparative literature and postcolonial studies have called for a return to philology as the indispensable basis of critical method in the humanities. Against such calls, this book argues that the privilege philology has always enjoyed within the modern humanities silently reinforces a colonial hierarchy. In fact, each of philology's foundational innovations originally served British rule in India. Tracing an unacknowledged history that extends from British Orientalist Sir William Jones to Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said and beyond, Archaeology of Babel excavates the epistemic transformation that was engendered on a global scale by the colonial reconstruction of native languages, literatures, and law. In the process, it reveals the extent to which even postcolonial studies and European philosophy—not to mention discourses as disparate as Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu nationalism, and global environmentalism—are the progeny of colonial rule. Going further, it unearths the alternate concepts of language and literature that were lost along the way and issues its own call for humanists to reckon with the politics of the philological practices to which they now return.

Nimrod and the Archaeology of the Tower of Babel

Nimrod and the Archaeology of the Tower of Babel PDF Author: Steven a Rudd
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN: 9781092122313
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
Large format 8.5x11, full colour high glossy pages with over 60 custom high-resolution maps, graphics and photos.When you get the chronology right, the cartography right and the archaeology right, you will get the Bible text right. What you read in the book you find in the ground! This is the Bible story of the origin of civilization after the global Noahic flood. Christian Archaeological Dating (CAD) requires that no archaeology predates the flood. Scripture dates creation to 5554 BC and the Flood to 3298 BC using the Septuagint. Eight Bible markers in Genesis 10-11 decode the date of the Tower of Babel to around 2850 BC. Archaeology informs us that the Tower of Babel was a Temple to Enki, the freshwater god and was similar in design to the Stepped Pyramid of Djoser in Egypt. In Sumerian flood stories, Enki was the rebel god who warned "Noah" to build the ark over the wishes of the supreme god Enlil who had decreed the destruction of mankind. Ancient Jewish, Christian and secular literary sources unanimous record that Nimrod built the Tower of Babel. Josephus tells us that Nimrod built the Tower of Babel to survive a possible second global flood. Archaeological excavations at Eridu (Babel) demonstrate how over 350 years, Nimrod built 17 pagan mudbrick temples, one upon the other, all dedicated to Enki, the "savior of mankind". In Sumerian myths, Enki also caused the division of languages at Babel (Gen 11). During this earliest period of post-flood civilization, "rebel" Nimrod plays a key and central role in almost every area. The identity of Nimrod is unknown, but he is best represented by the character of Enmerkar in Sumerian literary sources. Although excavations at biblical Babel (Tel Eridu) in the 1940's did not find any evidence of the Tower itself, evidence of the 300-meter square elevated platform upon which the Tower of Babel was going to be built has been documented. The city of Eridu (Babel) and the platform were abandoned for 750 years until the Assyrian King Ur-Nammu built a Ziggurat Temple to Enki upon it in 2100 BC. Abraham leaves Ur the very year that Ur-Nammu begins construction of the Ziggurat in 2100 BC. To the Christian Nimrod is antitypical of Satan, Absalom and Judas as the epitome of rebellion, treason and betrayal against the One True God. The Tower of Babel represents false world religions and false Christian doctrines.

Tower of Babel

Tower of Babel PDF Author: Bodie Hodge
Publisher: New Leaf Publishing Group
ISBN: 0890517150
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
The Tower of Babel: The Cultural History of Our Ancestors reveals our shared ancestry as never before! Many are familiar with the Biblical account of Babel, but after the dispersal, there was a void beyond Biblical history until empires like Rome and Greece arose. Now, discover the truth of these people groups and their civilizations that spread across the earth and trace their roots back to Babel as well as to the sons and grandsons of Noah. Many of today's scholars write off what occurred at the Tower of Babel as mythology and deny that it was a historical event. Beginning with the Biblical accounts, author Bodie Hodge researched ancient texts, critical clues, and rare historic records to help solve the mystery of what became of the failed builders of Babel. For the purpose of defending the Bible, Hodge presents these and other vital historical facts surrounding this much-debated event. Teens and older can use this layman's reference for Biblical classes, ancient history, apologetics training, and to realize their own cultural connection to the Bible.

The Anthology of Babel

The Anthology of Babel PDF Author: Ed Simon
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1950192474
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
Why should there only be literary scholarship about authors who actually lived, and texts which exist? Where are the articles on Enoch Campion, Linus Withold, Redondo Panza, Darshan Singh, or Heidi B. Morton? That none of these are real authors should be no impediment to interpreting their invented writings. In the first collection of its kind, The Anthology of Babel publishes academic articles by scholars on authors, books, and movements that are completely invented. Blurring the lines between scholarship and creative writing, The Anthology of Babel inaugurates a completely new literary genre perfectly attuned to the era we live in, a project evocative of Jorge-Louis Borges, Umberto Eco, and Italo Calvino.

Tar for Mortar

Tar for Mortar PDF Author: Jonathan Basile
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1947447505
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Book Description
TAR FOR MORTAR offers an in-depth exploration of one of literature's greatest tricksters, Jorge Luis Borges. His short story "The Library of Babel" is a signature examplar of this playfulness, though not merely for the inverted world it imagines, where a library thought to contain all possible permutations of all letters and words and books is plumbed by pious librarians looking for divinely pre-fabricated truths. One must grapple as well with the irony of Borges's narration, which undermines at every turn its narrator's claims of the library's universality, including the very possibility of exhausting meaning through combinatory processing. Borges directed readers to his non-fiction to discover the true author of the idea of the universal library. But his supposedly historical essays are notoriously riddled with false references and self-contradictions. Whether in truth or in fiction, Borges never reaches a stable conclusion about the atomic premises of the universal library - is it possible to find a character set capable of expressing all possible meaning, or do these letters, like his stories and essays, divide from themselves in a restless incompletion? While many readers of Borges see him as presaging our digital technologies, they often give too much credit to our inventions in doing so. Those who elide the necessary incompletion of the Library of Babel compare it to the Internet on the assumption that both are total archives of all possible thought and expression. Though Borges's imaginings lend themselves to digital creativity (libraryofbabel.info is certainly evidence of this), they do so by showing the necessary incompleteness of every totalizing project, no matter how technologically refined. Ultimately, Basile nudges readers toward the idea that a fictional/imaginary exposition can hold a certain power over technology.

Gods, Graves and Scholars

Gods, Graves and Scholars PDF Author: C.W. Ceram
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0394743199
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 568

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Book Description
C.W. Ceram visualized archeology as a wonderful combination of high adventure, romance, history and scholarship, and this book, a chronicle of man's search for his past, reads like a dramatic narrative. We travel with Heinrich Schliemann as, defying the ridicule of the learned world, he actually unearths the remains of the ancient city of Troy. We share the excitement of Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter as they first glimpse the riches of Tutankhamen's tomb, of George Smith when he found the ancient clay tablets that contained the records of the Biblical Flood. We rediscover the ruined splendors of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the wonders of the ancient wold; of Chichen Itza, the abandoned pyramids of the Maya: and the legendary Labyrinth of tile Minotaur in Crete. Here is much of the history of civilization and the stories of the men who rediscovered it. Illustrated with drawings, maps, and photographs

On the Ruins of Babel

On the Ruins of Babel PDF Author: Daniel L. Purdy
Publisher: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library
ISBN: 9780801476761
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Purdy traces the use of architectural reasoning as a method for critically examining consciousness from Kant and Hegel to Benjamin and Libeskind.

Babylon

Babylon PDF Author: Michael Seymour
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857736078
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
Babylon: for eons its very name has been a byword for luxury and wickedness. 'By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept', wrote the psalmist, 'as we remembered Zion'. One of the greatest cities of the ancient world, Babylon has been eclipsed by its own sinful reputation. For two thousand years the real, physical metropolis lay buried while another, ghostly city lived on, engorged on accounts of its own destruction. More recently the site of Babylon has been the centre of major excavation: yet the spectacular results of this work have done little displace the many other fascinating ways in which the city has endured and reinvented itself in culture. Saddam Hussein, for one, notoriously exploited the Babylonian myth to associate himself and his regime with its glorious past. Why has Babylon so creatively fired the human imagination, with results both good and ill? Why has it been so enthralling to so many, and for so long? In exploring answers, Michael Seymour' s book ranges extensively over space and time and embraces art, archaeology, history and literature. From Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar, via Strabo and Diodorus, to the Book of Revelation, Brueghel, Rembrandt, Voltaire, William Blake and modern interpreters like Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino and Gore Vidal, the author brings to light a carnival of disparate sources dominated by the powerful and intoxicating idea of depravity. Yet captivating as this dark mythology was and has continued to be, at its root lies a remarkable and sophisticated imperial civilization whose complex state-building, law- making and religion dominated Mesopotamia and beyond for millennia, before its incorporation into the still wider empire of the Achaemenid kings.

The Enigma of Isaac Babel

The Enigma of Isaac Babel PDF Author: Gregory Freidin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804773335
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A literary cult figure on a par with Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel has remained an enigma ever since he disappeared, along with his archive, inside Stalin's secret police headquarters in May of 1939. Made famous by Red Cavalry, a book about the Russian civil war (he was the world's first "embedded" war reporter), another book about the Jewish gangsters of his native Odessa, and yet another about his own Russian Jewish childhood, Babel has been celebrated by generations of readers, all craving fuller knowledge of his works and days. Bringing together scholars of different countries and areas of specialization, the present volume is the first examination of Babel's life and art since the fall of communism and the opening of Soviet archives. Part biography, part history, part critical examination of the writer's legacy in Russian, European, and Jewish cultural contexts, The Enigma of Isaac Babel will be of interest to the general reader and specialist alike.

The Power of Babel

The Power of Babel PDF Author: John McWhorter
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 006052085X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
There are approximately six thousand languages on Earth today, each a descendant of the tongue first spoken by Homo sapiens some 150,000 years ago. While laying out how languages mix and mutate over time, linguistics professor John McWhorter reminds us of the variety within the species that speaks them, and argues that, contrary to popular perception, language is not immutable and hidebound, but a living, dynamic entity that adapts itself to an ever-changing human environment. Full of humor and imaginative insight, The Power of Babel draws its illustrative examples from languages around the world, including pidgins, Creoles, and nonstandard dialects.