Mystical and Mythological Explanatory Works of Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars PDF Download
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Author: Alasdair Livingstone
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
The cuneiform writings of early Mesopotamia have generally been viewed by the modern world as both esoteric and obscure; to the scholars of ancient Assyria and Babylon, however, these works not only were comprehensible, but provided insight into puzzling aspects of their own cultures. In an illuminating essay, Livingstone focuses on a key group of these works that offer explanations of rituals through reference to myths, and to the mystical texts that supply their contexts. Supporting his work are texts in transliteration and translation, notes and discussion, along with cuneiform copies published here for the first time.
Author: Alasdair Livingstone
Publisher: Eisenbrauns
ISBN: 9781575061337
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
The cuneiform literature of ancient Mesopotamia is vast, ranging from economic texts, other sorts of record-keeping documents, and letters through texts that modern readers consider literary, including one category that is often considered esoteric. The latter works appear to be attempts on the part of the ancient scribe-scholars to explain parts of their own culture, to elucidate their own traditions. In the mid-1980s, Alasdair Livingstone studied these texts and then published the collection he had gathered. These texts demonstrate that the Assyrian and Babylonian scholars responsible for their creation had their own distinctive ideas about the function of myth and ritual. Livingstone's study was first published in 1986 by Oxford University Press but has been out of print for a number of years. Eisenbrauns is happy to make it available once again, in a quality hardback reprint.
Author: Mehmet-Ali Ataç
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521517907
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
In this book, Mehmet-Ali Ataç argues that the palace reliefs of the Neo-Assyrian Empire hold a meaning deeper than simple imperial propaganda.
Author: Christine Proust
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 303004176X
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
This volume explores how scholars wrote, preserved, circulated, and read knowledge in ancient Mesopotamia. It offers an exercise in micro-history that provides a case study for attempting to understand the relationship between scholars and scholarship during this time of great innovation. The papers in this collection focus on tablets written in the city of Uruk in southern Babylonia. These archives come from two different scholarly contexts. One is a private residence inhabited during successive phases by two families of priests who were experts in ritual and medicine. The other is the most important temple in Uruk during the late Achemenid and Hellenistic periods. The contributors undertake detailed studies of this material to explore the scholarly practices of individuals, the connection between different scholarly genres, and the exchange of knowledge between scholars in the city and scholars in other parts of Babylonia and the Greek world. In addition, this collection examines the archives in which the texts were found and the scribes who owned or wrote them. It also considers the interconnections between different genres of knowledge and the range of activities of individual scribes. In doing so, it answers questions of interest not only for the study of Babylonian scholarship but also for the study of ancient Mesopotamian textual culture more generally, and for the study of traditions of written knowledge in the ancient world.
Author: Dahlia Shehata
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004697578
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327
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Book Description
This volume lays theoretical and methodological groundwork for the analysis of Mesopotamian literature. A comprehensive first chapter by the editors explores critical contemporary issues in Sumerian and Akkadian narrative analysis, and nine case studies written by an international array of scholars test the responsiveness of Sumerian and Akkadian narratives to diverse approaches drawn from literary studies and theories of fiction. Included are intertextual and transtextual analyses, studies of narrative structure and focalization, and treatments of character and characterization. Works considered include the Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic and many other Sumerian and Akkadian narratives of gods, heroes, kings, and monsters.
Author: Francesca Rochberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022675958X
Category : History
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.
Author: Jonathan Ben-Dov
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047424190
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Rather than being an isolated, primitive body of knowledge the Jewish calendar tradition of 364 days constituted an integral part of the astronomical science of the ancient world. This tradition—attested in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the Pseudepigrapha—stands out as a coherent, novel synthesis, representing the Jewish authors’ apocalyptic worldview. The calendar is studied here both “from within”—analyzing its textual manifestations —and “from without”—via a comparison with ancient Mesopotamian astronomy. This analysis reveals that the calendrical realm constituted a significant case of inter-cultural borrowing, pertinent to similar such cases in ancient literature. Special attention is given to the “Book of Astronomy” (1 Enoch 72-82) and a variety of calendrical and liturgical texts from Qumran.
Author: Spencer L. Allen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1614512361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480
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Book Description
This book investigates the issue of the singularity versus the multiplicity of ancient Near Eastern deities who are known by a common first name but differentiated by their last names, or geographic epithets. It focuses primarily on the Ištar divine names in Mesopotamia, Baal names in the Levant, and Yahweh names in Israel, and it is structured around four key questions: How did the ancients define what it meant to be a god - or more pragmatically, what kind of treatment did a personality or object need to receive in order to be considered a god by the ancients? Upon what bases and according to which texts do modern scholars determine when a personality or object is a god in an ancient culture? In what ways are deities with both first and last names treated the same and differently from deities with only first names? Under what circumstances are deities with common first names and different last names recognizable as distinct independent deities, and under what circumstances are they merely local manifestations of an overarching deity? The conclusions drawn about the singularity of local manifestations versus the multiplicity of independent deities are specific to each individual first name examined in accordance with the data and texts available for each divine first name.
Author: Greta Van Buylaere
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004373349
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396
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Book Description
Sources of Evil: Studies in Mesopotamian Exorcistic Lore is a collection of thirteen essays on the body of knowledge employed by ancient Near Eastern healing experts, most prominently the ‘exorcist’ and the ‘physician’, to help patients who were suffering from misfortunes caused by divine anger, transgressions of taboos, demons, witches, or other sources of evil. The volume provides new insights into the two most important catalogues of Mesopotamian therapeutic lore, the Exorcist’s Manual and the Aššur Medical Catalogue, and contains discussions of agents of evil and causes of illness, ways of repelling evil and treating patients, the interpretation of natural phenomena in the context of exorcistic lore, and a description of the symbolic cosmos with its divine and demonic inhabitants. "This volume in the series on Ancient Divination and Magic published by Brill is a welcome addition to the growing literature on ancient magic ..." -Ann Jeffers, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 43.5 (2019) "Since the focus of the conference from which the essays derive was narrow, most of the essays hang together well and even complement each other. Several offer state-of-the-art treatments of topics and texts that make the volume especially useful. Readers will find much in this volume that contributes to our understanding of Mesopotamian exorcists, magic, medicine, and conceptions of evil." -Scott Noegel, University of Washington, Journal of the American Oriental Society 140.1 (2020)
Author: Jeffrey L. Cooley
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 1575066939
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 407
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Book Description
Modern science historians have typically treated the sciences of the ancient Near East as separate from historical and cultural considerations. At the same time, biblical scholars, dominated by theological concerns, have historically understood the Israelite god as separate from the natural world. Cooley’s study, bringing to bear contemporary models of science history on the one hand and biblical studies on the other hand, seeks to bridge a gap created by 20th-century scholarship in our understanding of ancient Near Eastern cultures by investigating the ways in which ancient authors incorporated their cultures’ celestial speculation in narrative. In the literature of ancient Iraq, celestial divination is displayed quite prominently in important works such as Enuma Eliš and Erra and Išum. In ancient Ugarit as well, the sky was observed for devotional reasons, and astral deities play important roles in stories such as the Baal Cycle and Shahar and Shalim. Even though the veneration of astral deities was rejected by biblical authors, in the literature of ancient Israel the Sun, Moon, and stars are often depicted as active, conscious agents. In texts such as Genesis 1, Joshua 10, Judges 5, and Job 38, these celestial characters, these “sons of God,” are living, dynamic members of Yahweh’s royal entourage, willfully performing courtly, martial, and calendrical roles for their sovereign. The synthesis offered by this book, the first of its kind since the demise of the pan-Babylonianist school more than a century ago, is about ancient science in ancient Near Eastern literature.
Author: Choon Leong Seow
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900436952X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
