Patients and Performative Identities

Patients and Performative Identities PDF Author: J. Cale Johnson
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 1646020960
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
The missing piece in so many histories of Mesopotamian technical disciplines is the client, who often goes unnoticed by present-day scholars seeking to reconstruct ancient disciplines in the Near East over millennia. The contributions to this volume investigate how Mesopotamian medical specialists interacted with their patients and, in doing so, forged their social and professional identities. The chapters in this book explore rituals for success at court, the social classes who made use of such rituals, and depictions of technical specialists on seal impressions and in later Greco-Roman iconography. Several essays focus on Egalkura: rituals of entering the court, meant to invoke a favorable impression from the sovereign. These include detailed surveys and comparative studies of the genre and its roots in the emergent astrological paradigm of the late first millennium BC. The different media and modalities of interaction between technical specialists and their clients are also a central theme explored in detailed studies of the sickbed scene in the iconography of Mesopotamian cylinder seals and the transmission of specialized pharmaceutical knowledge from the Mesopotamian to the Greco-Roman world. Offering an encyclopedic survey of ritual clients attested in the cuneiform textual record, this volume outlines both the Mesopotamian and the Greco-Roman social contexts in which these rituals were used. It will be of interest to students of the history of medicine, as well as to students and scholars of ancient Mesopotamia. In addition to the editor, the contributors include Netanel Anor, Siam Bhayro, Strahil V. Panayotov, Maddalena Rumor, Marvin Schreiber, JoAnn Scurlock, and Ulrike Steinert.

Patients and Performative Identities

Patients and Performative Identities PDF Author: J. Cale Johnson
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 1646020960
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 203

Get Book Here

Book Description
The missing piece in so many histories of Mesopotamian technical disciplines is the client, who often goes unnoticed by present-day scholars seeking to reconstruct ancient disciplines in the Near East over millennia. The contributions to this volume investigate how Mesopotamian medical specialists interacted with their patients and, in doing so, forged their social and professional identities. The chapters in this book explore rituals for success at court, the social classes who made use of such rituals, and depictions of technical specialists on seal impressions and in later Greco-Roman iconography. Several essays focus on Egalkura: rituals of entering the court, meant to invoke a favorable impression from the sovereign. These include detailed surveys and comparative studies of the genre and its roots in the emergent astrological paradigm of the late first millennium BC. The different media and modalities of interaction between technical specialists and their clients are also a central theme explored in detailed studies of the sickbed scene in the iconography of Mesopotamian cylinder seals and the transmission of specialized pharmaceutical knowledge from the Mesopotamian to the Greco-Roman world. Offering an encyclopedic survey of ritual clients attested in the cuneiform textual record, this volume outlines both the Mesopotamian and the Greco-Roman social contexts in which these rituals were used. It will be of interest to students of the history of medicine, as well as to students and scholars of ancient Mesopotamia. In addition to the editor, the contributors include Netanel Anor, Siam Bhayro, Strahil V. Panayotov, Maddalena Rumor, Marvin Schreiber, JoAnn Scurlock, and Ulrike Steinert.

Assyrian and Babylonian Scholarly Text Catalogues

Assyrian and Babylonian Scholarly Text Catalogues PDF Author: Ulrike Steinert
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501504878
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 692

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Book Description
The reconstruction of ancient Mesopotamian medical, ritual and omen compendia and their complex history is still characterised by many difficulties, debates and gaps due to fragmentary or unpublished evidence. This book offers the first complete edition of the Assur Medical Catalogue, an 8th or 7th century BCE list of therapeutic texts, which forms a core witness for the serialisation of medical compendia in the 1st millennium BCE. The volume presents detailed analyses of this and several other related catalogues of omen series and rituals, constituting the corpora of divination and healing disciplines. The contributions discuss links between catalogues and textual sources, providing new insights into the development of compendia between serialization, standardization and diversity of local traditions. Though its a novel corpus-based approach, this volume revolutionizes the current understanding of Mesopotamian medical texts and the healing disciplines of "conjurer" and "physician". The research presented here allows one to identify core text corpora for these disciplines, as well as areas of exchange and borrowings between them.

Systems of Classification in Premodern Medical Cultures

Systems of Classification in Premodern Medical Cultures PDF Author: Ulrike Steinert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351335103
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Systems of Classification in Premodern Medical Cultures puts historical disease concepts in cross-cultural perspective, investigating perceptions, constructions and experiences of health and illness from antiquity to the seventeenth century. Focusing on the systematisation and classification of illness in its multiple forms, manifestations and causes, this volume examines case studies ranging from popular concepts of illness through to specialist discourses on it. Using philological, historical and anthropological approaches, the contributions cover perspectives across time from East Asian, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures, spanning ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome to Tibet and China. They aim to capture the multiplicity of disease concepts and medical traditions within specific societies, and to investigate the historical dynamics of stability and change linked to such concepts. Providing useful material for comparative research, the volume is a key resource for researchers studying the cultural conceptualisation of illness, including anthropologists, historians and classicists, among others.

The Comparable Body - Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman Medicine

The Comparable Body - Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman Medicine PDF Author: John Z Wee
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004356770
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
The Comparable Body - Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman Medicine explores how analogy and metaphor illuminate and shape conceptions about the human body and disease, through 11 case studies from ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman medicine. Topics address the role of analogy and metaphor as features of medical culture and theory, while questioning their naturalness and inevitability, their limits, their situation between the descriptive and the prescriptive, and complexities in their portrayal as a mutually intelligible medium for communication and consensus among users.

The Class Reunion—An Annotated Translation and Commentary on the Sumerian Dialogue Two Scribes

The Class Reunion—An Annotated Translation and Commentary on the Sumerian Dialogue Two Scribes PDF Author: J. Cale Johnson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004302107
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
In The Class Reunion—An Annotated Translation and Commentary on the Sumerian Dialogue Two Scribes, J. Cale Johnson and Markham J. Geller present a critical edition, translation and commentary on the Sumerian scholastic dialogue otherwise known as Two Scribes, Streit zweier Schulabsolventen or Dialogue 1. The two protagonists, the Professor and the Bureaucrat, each ridicule their opponent in alternating speeches, while at the same time scoring points based on their detailed knowledge of Sumerian lexical and literary traditions. But they also represent the two social roles into which nearly all graduates of the Old Babylonian Tablet House typically gained entrance. So the dialogue also reflects on larger themes such as professional identity and the nature of scholastic activity in Mesopotamia in the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1800–1600 BCE).

Encoding Metalinguistic Awareness

Encoding Metalinguistic Awareness PDF Author: E. Cancik-Kirschbaum
Publisher: PeWe-Verlag
ISBN: 3689850215
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
The Ancient Near East provides a particularly striking example for the dynamics of knowledge transfer throughout space and time. The civilizations that emerged here, at the dawn of history, attest to continuous processes of exchange, adaption, and negotiation, to the emergence of content and its reconfiguration, to diffusion, disappearance and resurgence of themes, concepts, topics and ideas. In the late fourth millennium the creation and implementation of supraregional notational systems in southern Mesopotamia triggers a cognitive revolution: within a few centuries the use of writing becomes a dominant cultural technique and over the subsequent millennia the technique of wedge-writing spreads throughout southwest Asia. Numerous indigenous cuneiform subcultures came into being in a wide variety of times and places, but these distinct instantiations were held together (and preserved the possibility of common legibility) through shared practices of teaching and learning, a common core of textual materials and, not least, a systematic instrumentarium for representing speech and notation. This repertoire is part of each of these streams of tradition, which characterise the cuneiform cultures as a whole. In light of the centuries of tradition, the great effort that has gone into its construction and maintenance as well as the preservation of original linguistic materials and their translation into more familiar languages, the validity of this scientific tradition, broadly conceived, cannot be disputed. Still, even if the historical processes of transmission within the cuneiform world and the difficulties of translating cuneiform sources into non-cuneiform traditions prevented a general and far-reaching mobilisation of the cuneiform sources as vehicles for scientific reflection, these same factors also ensured its continued survival in Mesopotamia and Syria for not centuries, but rather millennia. One of the most important components of this process was the awareness of practitioners about language, its role for and its impact on the generation of knowledge, and specifically about linguistic patterns. Among the literally innumerable textual artefacts from the ancient Near East, there are some that both explicitly and implicitly encode traces of this distinctively linguistic awareness. It was in pursuit of these traces of (meta)linguistic awareness that the participants in this volume came together.

A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages

A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages PDF Author: Rebecca Hasselbach-Andee
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 111919380X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
Covers the major languages, language families, and writing systems attested in the Ancient Near East Filled with enlightening chapters by noted experts in the field, this book introduces Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) languages and language families used during the time period of roughly 3200 BCE to the second century CE in the areas of Egypt, the Levant, eastern Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Iran. In addition to providing grammatical sketches of the respective languages, the book focuses on socio-linguistic questions such as language contact, diglossia, the development of literary standard languages, and the development of diplomatic languages or “linguae francae.” It also addresses the interaction of Ancient Near Eastern languages with each other and their roles within the political and cultural systems of ANE societies. Presented in five parts, The Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages provides readers with in-depth chapter coverage of the writing systems of ANE, starting with their decipherment. It looks at the emergence of cuneiform writing; the development of Egyptian writing in the fourth and early third millennium BCI; and the emergence of alphabetic scripts. The book also covers many of the individual languages themselves, including Sumerian, Egyptian, Akkadian, Hittite, Pre- and Post-Exilic Hebrew, Phoenician, Ancient South Arabian, and more. Provides an overview of all major language families and writing systems used in the Ancient Near East during the time period from the beginning of writing (approximately 3200 BCE) to the second century CE (end of cuneiform writing) Addresses how the individual languages interacted with each other and how they functioned in the societies that used them Written by leading experts on the languages and topics The Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages is an ideal book for undergraduate students and scholars interested in Ancient Near Eastern cultures and languages or certain aspects of these languages.

Exegetical Crossroads

Exegetical Crossroads PDF Author: Georges Tamer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110562936
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
The art of interpreting Holy Scriptures flourished throughout the culturally heterogeneous pre-modern Orient among Jews, Christians and Muslims. Different ways of interpretation developed within each religion not without considering the others. How were the interactions and how productive were they for the further development of these traditions? Have there been blurred spaces of scholarly activity that transcended sectarian borders? What was the role played by mutual influences in profiling the own tradition against the others? These and other related questions are critically treated in the present volume.

The Emergence of Multiple-Text Manuscripts

The Emergence of Multiple-Text Manuscripts PDF Author: Alessandro Bausi
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311064598X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
The universal practice of selecting and excerpting, summarizing and canonizing, arranging and organizing texts and visual signs, either in carefully dedicated types of manuscripts or not, is common to all manuscript cultures. Determined by intellectual or practical needs, this process is never neutral in itself. The resulting proximity and juxtaposition of previously distant contents, challenge previous knowledge and trigger further developments. With a vast selection of highly representative case studies – from India, Islamic Asia and Spain to Ethiopian cultures, from Ancient Christian to Coptic, and Medieval European domains – this volume deals with manuscripts planned or growing and resulting in time to comprise ‘more than one’. Whatever their contents – the natural world and related recipes, astronomical tables or personal notes, documentary, religious and even highly revered holy texts – codicological and textual features of these manuscripts reveal how similar needs received different answers in varying contexts and times.

Before Nature

Before Nature PDF Author: Francesca Rochberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022640613X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
There is nothing self-evident about nature. We tend to assume that what we call the 'natural world’ confronts us all and always has. This book is about the almost unimaginable state of relation to the world in which there was no sense of nature, no reference or word for it. Before the concept took shape--and changed shape, across the long history of European philosophy and science--for an equally long period beginning roughly in the early second millennium B.C.E., the author shows, the cuneiform world engaged in activities manifestly kindred with science in its engagement with and understanding of phenomena. The first book to make sense of this, Before Nature sets out how to understand cuneiform knowledge, prediction, and explanation in relation to science--without recourse to the idea of nature. Its central claim is that there was an Assyro-Babylonian tradition of knowledge about phenomena that bears relation to the history of science, regardless of the absence of a conscious category of nature around which to focus that epistemic tradition.