Download or read book From the 21st Century B C to the 21st Century A D written by Steven J. Garfinkle and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2013-12-02 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Establishing Value written by Vitali Bartash and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the reasons for which weights and scales were used to measure goods in Early Mesopotamia (ca. 3,200-2,000 BCE). The vast corpus of cuneiform records from this period sheds light on the various mechanisms behind the development of this cultural innovation. Weighing became the means of articulating the value of both imported and locally-produced goods within a socioeconomic system that had reached an unprecedented level of complexity. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of this cultural and economic phenomenon, which simultaneously reflected and shaped the relationships between individuals and groups in Mesopotamia throughout the third millennium BCE.

Download or read book The Growth of an Early State in Mesopotamia written by Justin Cale Johnson and published by Editorial CSIC - CSIC Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Este volumen recoge las contribuciones de los doce académicos internacionales que participaron en los talleres realizados en la 49a Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale (RAI) en Londres el 10 de julio de 2003 y la 51a RAI en Chicago el 19 de julio de 2005. Tales talleres se centraron en el reino de la Tercera Dinastía Ur (2112-2004 a. C.), uno de los primeros y mejor documentados períodos de formación en la Antigüedad. Los reyes Ur crearon un nuevo estado territorial en el sur de Mesopotamia, unido a un complejo aparato administrativo para gobernarlo. Un notable número de registros de este reino ha sobrevivido en forma de decenas de miles de tablillas de arcilla. Los capítulos de este volumen se centran en el funcionamiento real de esta nueva administración y la organización de dichos registros documentales; en las cuestiones específicas de la administración real, desde la presentación al rey de los aparatos de control administrativo a la organización de la fuerza de trabajo; y en la creación y el almacenamiento de textos tanto dentro como fuera de la administración real.

Download or read book Iraq written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Anatomy of a Mesopotamian City written by Elizabeth Caecilia Stone and published by Eisenbrauns. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This substantial volume presents the results of the Mashkan-shapir project which surveyed the extensive remains of this Old Babylonian city to the north of Nippur in the deserts of Iraq.

Download or read book A Glossary of Old Syrian written by Joaquin Sanmartín and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2024-06-05 with total page 531 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Glossary of Old Syrian: l–z is the second of two volumes that aim to map the lexicon of Old Syrian as it can be extracted and reconstructed from the (Old Akkadian) Eblaite through the Old and Middle Babylonian corpora. Referring to a continuum of dialects spoken in the Syrian-Levantine and Syrian-Mesopotamian regions through the third and second millennia BCE, “Old Syrian” is a diachronically conservative, geographically pluricentric, and pragmatically multilayered linguistic cluster. As such, the Glossary pays special attention to the distribution of lexical data along diachronic, diatopic, and diastratic criteria. Given the extent and widely dispersed nature of this data, entries are supported by the most representative corpora of the Old Syrian linguistic landscape. Each entry is headed by an etymon, a kind of prelinguistic consonantal skeleton, and further information about different lexemes, their roots, and their derivations is provided in subentries. As the lexicography of Old Syrian remains uncertain, the Glossary includes leading interpretative opinions alongside the most relevant Semitic material to corroborate the lexical choices it adopts. Bibliographical references are succinct and restricted, as a rule, to texts easily found in any Assyriological or Semitic library. Intended as a reference work in support of future study, A Glossary of Old Syrian offers a clear view of the state of the field.

Download or read book The First Ninety Years written by Lluís Feliu and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-09-11 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is dedicated to Miguel Civil in celebration of his 90th birthday. Civil has been one of the most influential scholars in the field of Sumerian studies over the course of his long career. This anniversary presents a welcome occasion to reflect on some aspects of the field in which he has been such a driving force.

Download or read book Bulletin written by University of Michigan. Museum of Art and published by UM Libraries. This book was released on 2005 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Cuneiform Texts and the Writing of History written by Marc Van De Mieroop and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-08 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cuneiform Texts and the Writing of History discusses how the abundant Mesopotamian cuneiform text sources can be used for the study of various aspects of history: political, social, economic and gender. Marc Van De Mieroop provides a student-friendly introduction to the subject and: * criticises disciplinary methodologies which are often informed by a desire to write a history of events * scrutinises the intellectual background of historical writings * examines how Mesopotamia's position as the 'other' in Classical and Biblical writings has influenced scholarship * illustrates approaches with examples taken from the entirety of Mesopotamian history.

Download or read book Ex Oriente Lex written by Raymond Westbrook and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2015-02-25 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential collection of Raymond Westbrook’s groundbreaking work on the cross-cultural history of ancient law. Throughout the twelve essays that appear in Ex Oriente Lex, Raymond Westbrook convincingly argues that the influence of Mesopotamian legal traditions and thought did not stop at the shores of the Mediterranean, but rather had a profound impact on the early laws and legal developments of Greece and Rome as well. He presents readers with tantalizing fragments of early Greek or archaic Roman law which, when placed in the context of the broader Near Eastern tradition, suddenly acquire unexpected new meanings. Before his untimely death in July 2009, Westbrook was regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on ancient legal history. Although his main field was ancient Near Eastern law, he also made important contributions to the study of early Greek and Roman law. In his examination of the relationship between ancient Near Eastern and pre-classical Greek and Roman law, Westbrook sought to demonstrate that the connection between the two legal spheres was not merely theoretical but also concrete. The Near Eastern legal heritage had practical consequences that help us understand puzzling individual cases in the Greek and Roman traditions. His essays provide rich material for further reflection and interdisciplinary discussion about compelling similarities between legal cultures and the continuity of legal traditions over several millennia. Aimed at classicists and ancient historians, as well as biblicists, Egyptologists, Assyriologists, and legal historians, this volume gathers many of Westbrook’s most important essays on the legal aspects of Near Eastern cultural influences on the Greco-Roman world, including one new, never-before-published piece. A preface by editors Deborah Lyons and Kurt Raaflaub details the importance of Westbrook’s work for the field of classics, while Sophie Démare-Lafont’s incisive introduction places Westbrook’s ideas within the wider context of ancient law.

Download or read book Mesopotamian Mathematics 2100 1600 BC written by Eleanor Robson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mathematics was integral to Mesopotamian scribal culture: indeed, writing was invented towards the end of the fourth millennium B.C. for the express purpose of recording numericalatical information. The main body of this book is a mathematical and philological discussion of the two hundred technical constants, or "coefficients," found in early second millennium mathematics. Their names and mathematical functions are established, leading to improved interpretations of several large mathematical topics. The origins of many coefficients--and much of the more practical mathematics--are traced to late third millennium accounting and quantity surveying practices. Finally, the coefficients are used to examine some aspects of mathematics education in early Mesopotamia.

Download or read book The Archaeomusicology of the Ancient Near East written by Richard J. Dumbrill and published by Trafford Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'This volume is a massive leap forward over any previous synthesis of the subject and includes at the very minimum so much information that its academic and scientific value is self evident. The freshness and profundity of Dumbrill's approach to the subject exceeds anything attempted before. 'The mythology of ancient Mesopotamia proves readable as tonal allegory when its numerology is decoded as tuning theory. By the third millennium BC both pentatonic and heptatonic tunings were quantified throughout the entire 12-tone gamut. Richard Dumbrill has documented the massive empirical experience with strings and pipes that makes this early musicalization of the universe believable.' The volume consists in 4 parts with foreword by Prof. Ernest McClain. The first is about the decipherment, translation and interpretation of the few theoretical cuneiform texts dating from the Old Babylonian period, about 2000 BC, to Neo Assyrian up to the mid first millennium BC. Dumbrill undertakes comparative analyses and criticism of various interpretations having preceded his own and introduces new material. The second part is about the Hurrian hymns, the earliest music ever written, circa 1400 BC, and are produced in their integrality. Attempts to the interpretation of Hymn H.6 are compared and followed by Dumbrill's methodology and interpretation. Each fragment of the collection is analyzed separately. The part concludes with statistical analyses attempting at the reconstruction of some Hurrian rules of composition. The third part consists in the organology with relevant philology and is the largest collection of the Mesopotamian instrumentarium. The last part is a unique lexicon of all known Mesopotamian terminology, with quotation of texts in which the philology appears. The book had been previously published under the title of 'The Musicology and Organology of the Ancient Near East' and now appears under its new title.

Download or read book Encyclopaedia of Historical Metrology Weights and Measures written by Jan Gyllenbok and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2018-04-25 with total page 977 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second volume of Gyllenbok's encyclopaedia of historical metrology comprises the first part of the compendium of measurement systems and currencies of all sovereign states of the modern World (A-I). Units of measurement are of vital importance in every civilization through history. Since the early ages, man has through necessity devised various measures to assist him in everyday life. They have enabled and continue to enable us to trade in commonly and equitably understood amounts, and to investigate, understand, and control the chemical, physical, and biological processes of the natural world. The encyclopeadia will be of use not only to historians of science and technology, but also to economic and social historians and should be in every major academic and national library as standard reference work on the topic.

Download or read book Mesopotamian Civilization written by Daniel T. Potts and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the material infrastructure of the civilization of Southern Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC. Examines the climate, landforms, and other conditions that enabled the area to become populated, details religious ideas and basic conditions of life, and compares contributions to Mesopotamian civilization from the East and from the West. Other subjects include agriculture and diet, kinship, mortuary practices, and functional aspects of writing and sealing. Includes many bandw drawings and maps. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia written by J. Nicholas Reid and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia explores the earliest historical evidence related to imprisonment in the history of the world. While many historical investigations into prisons have revolved around the important question of punishment, this work moves beyond that more narrow approach to consider the multifunctional practices of detaining the body in ancient Iraq. It is the contention of this book that imprisonment arose out of the desire to control and detain the body in relation to labor. The practice of detainment for coercion became adaptable to a variety of circumstances and goals, which shaped the contexts and practices of imprisonment. With time, religious ideology was attached to imprisonment. In one literary text, a prisoner was refined like silver and given new birth in the prison. The misery of imprisonment gave rise to lament through which a criminal could be ritually purified and restored to a right relationship with their personal god. Beyond this literary perspective, this work reconstructs how imprisonment and religious ideology intersected with the judicial process and explores the evidence related to the reasons behind imprisonment, the treatment of prisoners, and the evidence related to the lengths of their stays.

Download or read book The Akkadian Verb and Its Semitic Background written by N. J. C. Kouwenberg and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-06-23 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this magnum opus, N. J. C. Kouwenberg presents a thoroughgoing, modern analysis of the Akkadian verbal system, taking into account all of the currently available evidence for the language during the course of the long period of its attestation. The book achieves this goal through two strategies: (1) to describe the Akkadian verbal system, as comprehensively as the data permit; and (2) to reconstruct its prehistory on the basis of internal evidence and reconstruction, comparison with cognate languages, and typological evidence. Akkadian has one of the longest documented histories of any language: data from nearly two-and-one-half millennia are available, even if the stream of data is sometimes interrupted and not always as copious as we would like. During the course of this history, numerous developments took place, illustrating how languages change over time and offering parallels for reconstruction of changes that occurred in poorly documented periods. As a result, this book will be of great interest, in the first place, for all students of Akkadian, both the language and the literature that is documented in that language; and in the second place, for all students of language and linguistics who are interested in the study of how languages are shaped, develop, and change during the course of a long history.

Download or read book Babylonian Creation Myths written by Wilfred G. Lambert and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2013-09-26 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For much of the last half of the twentieth century, W. G. Lambert devoted much of his research energy and effort to the study of Babylonian texts dealing with Mesopotamian ideas regarding creation, including especially Enuma Elish. This volume, which appears almost exactly 2 years after Lambert’s death, distills a lifetime of learning by the world’s foremost expert on these texts. Lambert provides a full transliteration and translation of the 7 tablets of Enuma Elish, based on the known exemplars, as well as coverage of a number of other texts that bear on, or are thought to bear on, Mesopotamian notions of the origin of the world, mankind, and the gods. New editions of seventeen additional “creation tales” are provided, including “Enmesharra’s Defeat,” “Enki and Ninmah,” “The Slaying of Labbu,” and “The Theogony of Dunnu.” Lambert pays special attention, of course, to the connection of the main epic, Enuma Elish, with the rise and place of Marduk in the Babylonian pantheon. He traces the development of this deity’s origin and rise to prominence and elaborates the relationship of this text, and the others discussed, to the religious and political climate Babylonia. The volume includes 70 plates (primarily hand-copies of the various exemplars of Enuma Elish) and extensive indexes.