Download or read book How Mesopotamian Scribes Learned to Write Legal Documents written by Walter Ray Bodine and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides insight into social and economic activities provided to us in the cuneiform records of ancient periods revealing how these activities were negotiated and regulated by laws and contracts, through records of the Sumerian model contracts from the Mesopotamian scribal school curriculum.
Download or read book Women s Writing of Ancient Mesopotamia written by Charles Halton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology translates and discusses texts authored by women of ancient Mesopotamia.
Download or read book The Laws of Hammurabi written by Pamela Barmash and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-24 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the best-known and most esteemed people known from antiquity is the Babylonian king Hammurabi. His fame and reputation are due to the collection of laws written under his patronage. This book offers an innovative interpretation of the Laws of Hammurabi. Ancient scribes would demonstrate their legal flair by composing statutes on a set of traditional cases, articulating what they deemed just and fair. The scribe of the Laws of Hammurabi advanced beyond earlier scribes in composing statutes that manifest systematization and implicit legal principles, and inserted the Laws of Hammurabi into the form of a royal inscription, shrewdly reshaping the genre. This tradition of scribal improvisation on a set of traditional cases continued outside of Mesopotamia. It influenced biblical law and the law of the Hittite empire significantly. The Laws of Hammurabi was also witness to the start of another stream of intellectual tradition. It became the subject of formal commentaries, marking a profound cultural shift. Scribes related to it in ways that diverged from prior attitudes; it became an object of study and of commentary, a genre that names itself as dependent on another text. The famous Laws of Hammurabi is here given the extensive attention it continues to merit.
Download or read book The Scribe in the Biblical World written by Esther Eshel and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-12-05 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a fresh look at the status of the scribe in society, his training, practices, and work in the biblical world. What was the scribe’s role in these societies? Were there rival scribal schools? What was their role in daily life? How many scripts and languages did they grasp? Did they master political and religious rhetoric? Did they travel or share foreign traditions, cultures, and beliefs? Were scribes redactors, or simply copyists? What was their influence on the redaction of the Bible? How did they relate to the political and religious powers of their day? Did they possess any authority themselves? These are the questions that were tackled during an international conference held at the University of Strasbourg on June 17–19, 2019. The conference served as the basis for this publication, which includes fifteen articles covering a wide geographical and chronological range, from Late Bronze Age royal scribes to refugees in Masada at the end of the Second Temple period.
Download or read book Scribal Education in the Sargonic Period written by Nicholas L. Kraus and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-12 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scribal Education in the Sargonic Period presents an in-depth analysis of scribal education during the period of Sargonic hegemony in ancient Mesopotamia (c. 2335-2150 BCE).
Download or read book Writing Law and Kingship in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia written by Dominique Charpin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-11-15 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient Mesopotamia, the fertile crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now western Iraq and eastern Syria, is considered to be the cradle of civilization—home of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, as well as the great Code of Hammurabi. The Code was only part of a rich juridical culture from 2200–1600 BCE that saw the invention of writing and the development of its relationship to law, among other remarkable firsts. Though ancient history offers inexhaustible riches, Dominique Charpin focuses here on the legal systems of Old Babylonian Mesopotamia and offers considerable insight into how writing and the law evolved together to forge the principles of authority, precedent, and documentation that dominate us to this day. As legal codes throughout the region evolved through advances in cuneiform writing, kings and governments were able to stabilize their control over distant realms and impose a common language—which gave rise to complex social systems overseen by magistrates, judges, and scribes that eventually became the vast empires of history books. Sure to attract any reader with an interest in the ancient Near East, as well as rhetoric, legal history, and classical studies, this book is an innovative account of the intertwined histories of law and language.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Law in the Hebrew Bible written by Bruce Wells and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-31 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Making a Case written by Sara J. Milstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-11 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Outside of the Bible, all of the known Near Eastern law collections were produced in the third to second millennia BCE, in cuneiform on clay tablets, and in major cities in Mesopotamia and in the Hittite Empire. None of the major sites in Syria that have yielded cuneiform tablets has borne even a fragment of a law collection, even though several have produced ample legal documentation. Excavations at Nuzi have also turned up numerous legal documents, but again, no law collection. Even Egypt has not yielded a collection of laws. As such, the biblical texts that scholars regularly identify as law collections represent the only "western," non-cuneiform expressions of the genre in the ancient Near East, produced by societies not known for their political clout, and separated in time from "other" collections by centuries. Making a Case: The Practical Roots of Biblical Law challenges the long-held notion that Israelite and Judahite scribes either made use of "old" law collections or set out to produce law collections in the Near Eastern sense of the genre. Instead, what we call "biblical law" is closer in form and function to another, oft-neglected Mesopotamian genre: legal-pedagogical texts. During their education, Mesopotamian scribes studied a variety of legal-oriented school texts, including sample contracts, fictional cases, short sequences of laws, and legal phrasebooks. When biblical law is viewed in the context of these legal-pedagogical texts from Mesopotamia, its practical roots in a set of comparable legal exercises begin to emerge.
Download or read book Law and Commerce in Pre Industrial Societies written by Barry Hawk and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Well before states, literacy, or legal systems, there were commerce and trade, which are found in all societies irrespective of politics, social norms or ideologies. Athenian landowners, Roman senators and Qing mandarins screened their participation in commerce and trade. Legal and informal institutions were developed to secure persons and property, resolve commercial disputes, raise capital and share risk, promote fair dealing, regulate agents and gather market information. Law and Commerce in Pre-Industrial Societies examines commerce, its participants and these institutions through the lens of nine pre-industrial societies: Hunter/gatherers, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Athens, Rome, the early Islamic world, medieval Europe, medieval Southern India and Qing China. The book provides historical perspective to contemporary debates about the relationship between commerce and law, public ordering versus privately created systems of law, the rule of law and the relative merits of courts versus merchant networks to resolve disputes.
Download or read book Supplementation and the Study of the Hebrew Bible written by Saul M. Olyan and published by SBL Press. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explore the role supplementation played in the development of the Hebrew Bible This new volume includes ten original essays that demonstrate clearly how common, varied, and significant the phenomenon of supplementation in the Hebrew Bible is. Contributors examine instances of supplementation ranging from minor additions to aid pronunciation, to fill in abbreviations, or to clarify ambiguous syntax to far more elaborate changes, such as interpolations within a work of prose, in a prophetic text, or in a legal text. Scholars also examine supplementation by the addition of an introduction, a conclusion, or an introductory and concluding framework to a particular lyrical, legal, prophetic, or narrative text. Features: A contribution to the further development of a panbiblical compositional perspective Examples from Psalms, the pentateuchal narratives, the Deuteronomistic History, the Latter Prophets, and legal texts
Download or read book A History of Hittite Literacy written by Theo van den Hout and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-07 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did the Anatolians remain illiterate for so long, although surrounded by people using script? Why and how did they eventually adopt the cuneiform writing system and why did they still invent a second, hieroglyphic script of their own? What did and didn't they write down and what role did Hittite literature, the oldest known literature in any Indo-European language, play? These and many other questions on scribal culture are addressed in this first, comprehensive book on writing, reading, script usage, and literacy in the Hittite kingdom (c.1650–1200 BC). It describes the rise and fall of literacy and literature in Hittite Anatolia in the wider context of its political, economic, and intellectual history.
Download or read book Old Babylonian Texts in the Sch yen Collection Part Two written by A. R. George and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2019-08-15 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In ancient Mesopotamia, men training to be scribes copied model letters in order to practice writing and familiarize themselves with epistolary forms and expressions. Similarly, model contracts were used to teach them how to draw up agreements for the transactions typical of everyday economic life. This volume makes available a trove of previously unknown tablets and fragments, now housed in the Shøyen Collection, that were produced in the training of scribes in Old Babylonian schools. Following on Old Babylonian Texts in the Schøyen Collection, Part One: Selected Letters, this volume publishes the contents of sixty-five tablets bearing Akkadian letters used to train scribes and twenty-six prisms and tablets carrying Sumerian legal texts copied in the same context. Each text is presented in transliterated form and in translation, with appropriate commentary and annotations and, at the end of the book, photographs of the cuneiform. The material is made easily navigable by a catalogue, bibliography, and indexes. This collection of previously unknown documents expands the extant corpus of educational texts, making an essential contribution to the study of the ancient world.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture written by Karen Radner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-22 with total page 838 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cuneiform script, the writing system of ancient Mesopotamia, was witness to one of the world's oldest literate cultures. For over three millennia, it was the vehicle of communication from (at its greatest extent) Iran to the Mediterranean, Anatolia to Egypt. The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture examines the Ancient Middle East through the lens of cuneiform writing. The contributors, a mix of scholars from across the disciplines, explore, define, and to some extent look beyond the boundaries of the written word, using Mesopotamia's clay tablets and stone inscriptions not just as 'texts' but also as material artefacts that offer much additional information about their creators, readers, users and owners.
Download or read book The Finger of the Scribe written by William M. Schniedewind and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-16 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the enduring problems in biblical studies is how the Bible came to be written. Clearly, scribes were involved. But our knowledge of scribal training in ancient Israel is limited. William Schniedewind explores the unexpected cache of inscriptions discovered at a remote, Iron Age military post called Kuntillet 'Ajrud to assess the question of how scribes might have been taught to write. Here, far from such urban centers as Jerusalem or Samaria, plaster walls and storage pithoi were littered with inscriptions. Apart from the sensational nature of some of the contents-perhaps suggesting Yahweh had a consort-these inscriptions also reflect actual writing practices among soldiers stationed near the frontier. What emerges is a very different picture of how writing might have been taught, as opposed to the standard view of scribal schools in the main population centers.
Download or read book Translation as Scholarship written by Jay Crisostomo and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-01-14 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first half of the 2d millennium BCE, translation occasionally depicted semantically incongruous correspondences. Such cases reflect ancient scribes substantiating their virtuosity with cuneiform writing by capitalizing on phonologic, graphemic, semantic, and other resemblances in the interlingual space. These scholar–scribes employed an essential scribal practice, analogical hermeneutics, an interpretative activity grounded in analogical reasoning and empowered by the potentiality of the cuneiform script. Scribal education systematized such practices, allowing scribes to utilize these habits in copying compositions and creating translations. In scribal education, analogical hermeneutics is exemplified in the word list "Izi", both in its structure and in its occasional bilingualism. By examining "Izi" as a product of the social field of scribal education, this book argues that scribes used analogical hermeneutics to cultivate their craft and establish themselves as knowledgeable scribes. Within a linguistic epistemology of cuneiform scribal culture, translation is a tool in the hands of a knowledgeable scholar.
Download or read book Letters from Mesopotamia Official Business and Private Letters on Clay Tablets from Two Millennia written by A. Leo Oppenheim and published by Chicago : University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1967 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Materiality of Writing in Early Mesopotamia written by Thomas E. Balke and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-10-24 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents recent research on the relationship between the material format of text-bearing artefacts, the texts they carry, and their genre. The essays cover a vast period, from the counting stones of the late 4th millennium BCE to the time of the Great Hittite Kingdom in the 2nd millennium BCE. The breadth of substantive focus allows new insights of relevance to scholars in both Ancient Middle Eastern studies and the humanities.
