Author: J. Cale Johnson
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 364350179X
Category : Sumerian language
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
Sumerian, probably the earliest attested language in human history, has no known cognates. Accordingly, many features of Sumerian grammar are still under discussion. Up to now research has focused primarily on questions of Sumerian phonology and morphology. In this present study the author concentrates on syntactic or pragmatic phenomena, especially on the referential properties of the nominal component of certain so-called compound verbs, the unaccusativity contrast, and the possibility of generic quantification in the double object construction.
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).
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.
Author: Steven J. Garfinkle
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 1575068710
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 521
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Book Description
This volume collects the proceedings of a three-day conference held in Madrid in July 2010, and it highlights the vitality of the study of late-third-millennium B.C. Mesopotamia. Workshops devoted to the Ur III period have been a feature of the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale roughly every other year, beginning in London in 2003. In 2009, Steve Garfinkle and Manuel Molina asked the community of Neo-Sumerian scholars to convene the following year in Madrid before the Rencontre in Barcelona. The meeting had more than 50 participants and included 8 topical sessions and 27 papers. The 21 contributions included in this volume cover a broad range of topics: new texts, new interpretations, and new understandings of the language, culture, and history of the Ur III period (2112–2004 B.C.). The present and future of Neo-Sumerian studies are important not only for the field of Assyriology but also for wider inquiries into the ancient world. The extant archives offer insight into some of the earliest cities and one of the earliest kingdoms in the historical record. The era of the Third Dynasty of Ur is also probably the best-attested century in antiquity. This imposes a responsibility on the small community of scholars who work on the Neo-Sumerian materials to make this it accessible to a broad, interdisciplinary audience in the humanities and related fields. This volume is a solid step in this direction.
Author: J. Cale Johnson
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110642689
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 504
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Book Description
Physiognomy and ekphrasis are two of the most important modes of description in antiquity and represent the necessary precursors of scientific description. The primary way of divining the characteristics and fate of an individual, whether inborn or acquired, was to observe the patient’s external characteristics and behaviour. This volume focuses initially on two types of descriptive literature in Mesopotamia: physiognomic omens and what we might call ekphrastic description. These modalities are traced through ancient India, Ugaritic and the Hebrew Bible, before arriving at the physiognomic features of famous historical figures such as Themistocles, Socrates or Augustus in the Graeco-Roman world, where physiognomic discussions become intertwined with typological analyses of human characters. The Arabic compendial culture absorbed and remade these different physiognomic and ekphrastic traditions, incorporating both Mesopotamian links between physiognomy and medicine and the interest in characterological ‘types’ that had emerged in the Hellenistic period. This volume offer the first wide-ranging picture of these modalities of description in antiquity.
Author: Shai Gordin
Publisher: PeWe-Verlag
ISBN: 3689850452
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261
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Book Description
Ancient writing systems employ logographic and logophonetic principles playing on the relationship between writing, script and scribal learning. The workshop proceedings published in this volume explore the way these relationships encode knowledge and meaning reflected in the social, historical and cultural mentality of the early peoples of East Asia (China and Japan), Anatolia, the Aegean, Egypt and Mesoamerica. The meeting was organized in the FU Berlin on the fall of 2010 by the editor and Dr. Renata Landgrafova (now Charles University, Prague) in the frame of the DFG research training group 1458 "Notational Iconicity" ("Schriftbildlichkeit") headed by Prof. Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum and Prof. Sybille Kramer. The premise of our meeting was that script and the organization of texts can reveal how knowledge is transformed and transmitted among different social groups across time and space, and eventually standardized as written tradition. Its multidisciplinary approach follows recent trends in the attempt to arouse debate between scholars of disparate systems of writing - be it Cuneiform, Hieroglyphic or Linear in nature - and to discuss their elements independent of origin or cultural context. A broad perspective on ancient writing and its visual elements was established with the contributions delving into the aspects of generating knowledge and meaning (J. Janak, M. Weeden), categorizing knowledge (E. Boot, T. W. Kwan, H. Tomas), diffusion and transformation of knowledge (Sh. Gordin, R. Landgrafova) and rationalizing knowledge (E. Birk).
Author: Natalie N. May
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004262342
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
The Fabric of Cities presents an interdisciplinary collection of articles on urbanism in ancient Mesopotamia, Israel, Greece and Rome, which focuses on the social dimension of cities' topographical features. The contributions of this book offer investigations of neighbourhoods, city gates, streets, temples and palaces drawing on textual and archaeological sources as well as art. The topics treated in this work encompass the diverse functions of public and marginal spaces in Mesopotamian cities and Rome, the role of agency in the development of Babylonian neighbourhoods, the relationship between public and private in Assyrian palaces, the connection between political strategies and temple building in Sumerian literary texts, and the communicative uses of language in Classical Greek texts to talk about urban space.
Author: J. Cale Johnson
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501502506
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
In the Wake of the Compendia presents papers that examine the history of technical compendia as they moved between institutions and societies in ancient and medieval Mesopotamia. This volume offers new perspectives on the development and transmission of technical compilations, looking especially at the relationship between empirical knowledge and textual transmission in early scientific thinking. The eleven contributions to the volume derive from a panel held at the American Oriental Society in 2013 and cover more than three millennia of historical development, ranging from Babylonian medicine and astronomy to the persistence of Mesopotamian lore in Syriac and Arabic meditations on the properties of animals. The volume also includes major contributions on the history of Mesopotamian “rationality,” epistemic labels for tested and tried remedies, and the development of depersonalized case histories in Babylonian therapeutic compendia. Together, these studies offer an overview of several important moments in the development of non-Western scientific thinking and a significant contribution to our understanding of how traditions of technical knowledge were produced and transmitted in the ancient world.
Author: Joshua Englehardt
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1457174022
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
"Through the lens of agency, contributors successfully rethink the nature of ancient texts. In so doing they ably demonstrate that when a new theoretical orientation is applied to a taken-for-granted category of data it invigorates both the data and our understanding of the past." —Marcia-Anne Dobres, University of Main Individual agents are frequently evident in early writing and notational systems, yet these systems have rarely been subjected to the concept of agency as it is traceable in archeology. Agency in Ancient Writing addresses this oversight, allowing archeologists to identify and discuss real, observable actors and actions in the archaeological record. Embracing myriad ways in which agency can be interpreted, ancient writing systems from Mesoamerica, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Crete, China, and Greece are examined from a textual perspective as both archaeological objects and nascent historical documents. This allows for distinction among intentions, consequences, meanings, and motivations, increasing understanding and aiding interpretation of the subjectivity of social actors. Chapters focusing on acts of writing and public recitation overlap with those addressing the materiality of texts, interweaving archaeology, epigraphy, and the study of visual symbol systems. Agency in Ancient Writing leads to a more thorough and meaningful discussion of agency as an archaeological concept and will be of interest to anyone interested in ancient texts, including archaeologists, historians, linguists, epigraphers, and art historians, as well as scholars studying agency and structuration theory.
Author: Martin Worthington
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429754507
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 536
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Book Description
This volume opens up new perspectives on Babylonian and Assyrian literature, through the lens of a pivotal passage in the Gilgamesh Flood story. It shows how, using a nine-line message where not all was as it seemed, the god Ea inveigled humans into building the Ark. The volume argues that Ea used a ‘bitextual’ message: one which can be understood in different ways that sound the same. His message thus emerges as an ambivalent oracle in the tradition of ‘folktale prophecy’. The argument is supported by interlocking investigations of lexicography, divination, diet, figurines, social history, and religion. There are also extended discussions of Babylonian word play and ancient literary interpretation. Besides arguing for Ea’s duplicity, the book explores its implications – for narrative sophistication in Gilgamesh, for audiences and performance of the poem, and for the relation of the Gilgamesh Flood story to the versions in Atra-hasīs, the Hellenistic historian Berossos, and the Biblical Book of Genesis. Ea’s Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story will interest Assyriologists, Hebrew Bible scholars and Classicists, but also students and researchers in all areas concerned with Gilgamesh, word-play, oracles, and traditions about the Flood.
