Download or read book The Correspondence of the Kings of Ur written by Piotr Michalowski and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2011-06-23 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Correspondence of the Kings of Ur is a collection of literary letters between the Ur III monarchs and their high officials at the end of the third millennium B.C. The letters cover topics of royal authority and proper governance, defense of frontier regions, and the ultimate disintegration of the empire and represent the largest corpus of Sumerian prose literature we possess. This long-awaited edition, based on extensive collation of almost all extant manuscripts, numbering more than a hundred, includes detailed historical and literary analyses, and copious philological commentary. It entirely supersedes the Michalowski’s oft-cited unpublished Yale dissertation of 1976. The edition is accompanied by an extensive analysis of the place of the letters in early second-millennium schooling, treating the letters as literature, followed by chapters that contextualize the epistolary material within historical and historiographic contexts, utilizing many Sumerian archival, literary, and historical sources. The main objective here is to try to navigate the complex issues of authenticity, authority, and fiction that arise from the study of these literary artifacts. In addition, Michalowski offers new hypotheses about many aspects of late third-millennium history, including essays on military history and strategy, on frontiers, on the nature and putative character of nomadism at the time, as well as a long chapter on the role of a people designated as Amorites. The included DVD includes various photographs at high resolution of most of the tablets included in the study.
Download or read book The World s Oldest Literature written by William W. Hallo and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010 with total page 801 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature begins at Sumer, we may say. Given that this ancient crossroads of tin and copper produced not only bronze and the entire Bronze Age, but also by neccesity, the first system of record-keeping and the technique of writing. Scribal schools served to propogate the new technique and their curriculum grew to create, preserve and transmit all manner of creative poetry. In a lifetime of research, the author has studied multiple aspects of this most ancient literary oeuvre, including such questions as chronology and bilingualism, as well as contributing fundamental insights into specific genres such as proverbs, letter-prayers and lamentations. In addition, he has drawn conclusions for the comparative or contextual approach to biblical literature. His studies, widely scattered in diverse publications for nearly fifty years, are here assembled in convenient one-volume format, made more user-friendly by extensive cross-references and indices.
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 The Business and Administrative Correspondence Under the Kings of Ur written by Edmond Sollberger and published by Locust Valley, N.Y : J. J. Augustin. This book was released on 1966 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Letters of the Great Kings of the Ancient Near East written by Trevor Bryce and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-03 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering fascinating insights into the people and politics of the ancient near Eastern kingdoms, Trevor Bryce uses the letters of the five Great Kings as the focus of a fresh look at this turbulent and volatile region in the late Bronze Age.
Download or read book Thinking Recording and Writing History in the Ancient World written by Kurt A. Raaflaub and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-11-08 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thinking, Recording, and Writing History in the Ancient World presents a cross-cultural comparison of the ways in which ancient civilizations thought about the past and recorded their own histories. Written by an international group of scholars working in many disciplines Truly cross-cultural, covering historical thinking and writing in ancient or early cultures across in East, South, and West Asia, the Mediterranean, and the Americas Includes historiography shaped by religious perspectives, including Judaism, early Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism
Download or read book The Oxford History of Historical Writing written by Daniel R. Woolf and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-17 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A chronological scholarly survey of the history of historical writing in five volumes. Each volume covers a particular period of time, from the beginning of writing to the present day, and from all over the world.
Download or read book The Sumerians written by Samuel Noah Kramer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-09-17 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sumerians, the pragmatic and gifted people who preceded the Semites in the land first known as Sumer and later as Babylonia, created what was probably the first high civilization in the history of man, spanning the fifth to the second millenniums B.C. This book is an unparalleled compendium of what is known about them. Professor Kramer communicates his enthusiasm for his subject as he outlines the history of the Sumerian civilization and describes their cities, religion, literature, education, scientific achievements, social structure, and psychology. Finally, he considers the legacy of Sumer to the ancient and modern world. "There are few scholars in the world qualified to write such a book, and certainly Kramer is one of them. . . . One of the most valuable features of this book is the quantity of texts and fragments which are published for the first time in a form available to the general reader. For the layman the book provides a readable and up-to-date introduction to a most fascinating culture. For the specialist it presents a synthesis with which he may not agree but from which he will nonetheless derive stimulation."—American Journal of Archaeology "An uncontested authority on the civilization of Sumer, Professor Kramer writes with grace and urbanity."—Library Journal
Download or read book The Ancient Near East written by Mario Liverani and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-04 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ancient Near East reveals three millennia of history (c. 3500–500 bc) in a single work. Liverani draws upon over 25 years’ worth of experience and this personal odyssey has enabled him to retrace the history of the peoples of the Ancient Near East. The history of the Sumerians, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians and more is meticulously detailed by one of the leading scholars of Assyriology. Utilizing research derived from the most recent archaeological finds, the text has been fully revised for this English edition and explores Liverani’s current thinking on the history of the Ancient Near East. The rich and varied illustrations for each historical period, augmented by new images for this edition, provide insights into the material and textual sources for the Ancient Near East. Many highlight the ingenuity and technological prowess of the peoples in the Ancient East. Never before available in English, The Ancient Near East represents one of the greatest books ever written on the subject and is a must read for students who will not have had the chance to explore the depth of Liverani’s scholarship.
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 Problems of Canonicity and Identity Formation in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia written by Gojko Barjamovic and published by Museum Tusculanum Press. This book was released on 2016-04-24 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term ‘canonicity’ implies the recognition that the domain of literature and of the library is also a cultural and political one, related to various forms of identity formation, maintenance, and change. Scribes and benefactors ‘create’ canon in as much as they teach, analyze, preserve, prom¬ulgate and change ‘canonical’ texts according to prevailing norms. From early on, texts from the written traditions of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt were accumulated, codified, and to some extent canonized, as various collections developed mainly in the environment of the temple and the palace. These written traditions represent sets of formal and informal cultures that all speak in their own ways of canonicity, normativity, and other forms of cultural expertise. Some forms of literature were used not only in scholarly contexts, but also in political ones, and they served purposes of identity formation. This volume addresses the interrelations between various forms of ‘canon’ and identity formation in different time periods, genres, regions, and contexts, as well as the application of contemporary conceptions of ‘canon’ to ancient texts.
Download or read book The Sumerians written by Leonard Woolley and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1965 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the civilization of the Sumerians, who inhabited the land which today is Iraq, in the beginning of the fourth millennium B.C.
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 Religion Ethnicity and Xenophobia in the Bible written by Brian Rainey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-11-21 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion, Ethnicity and Xenophobia in the Bible looks at some of the Bible’s most hostile and violent anti-foreigner texts and raises critical questions about how students of the Bible and ancient Near East should grapple with "ethnicity" and "foreignness" conceptually, hermeneutically and theologically. The author uses insights from social psychology, cognitive psychology, anthropology, sociology and ethnic studies to develop his own perspective on ethnicity and foreignness. Starting with legends about Mesopotamian kings from the third millennium BCE, then navigating the Deuteronomistic and Holiness traditions of the Hebrew Bible, and finally turning to Deuterocanonicals and the Apostle Paul, the book assesses the diverse and often inconsistent portrayals of foreigners in these ancient texts. This examination of the negative portrayal of foreigners in biblical and Mesopotamian texts also leads to a broader discussion about how to theorize ethnicity in biblical studies, ancient studies and the humanities. This volume will be invaluable to students of ethnicity and society in the Bible, at all levels.
Download or read book Education in Early 2nd Millennium BC Babylonia written by Alexandra Kleinerman and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-08-25 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines a collection of twenty-two literary letters and related compositions, the Sumerian Epistolary Miscellany, studied as part of the Old Babylonian Sumerian scribal curriculum, in an attempt to better understand the nature of the curriculum as a whole.
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 Fortune and Misfortune in the Ancient Near East written by Olga Drewnowska and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2016-12-27 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the week between July 21 and 25, 2014, the University of Warsaw hosted more than three hundred Assyriologists from all over the world. In the course of five days, nearly 150 papers were read in three (and sometimes four) parallel sessions. Many of them were delivered within the framework of nine thematic workshops. The publication of most of these panels is underway, in separate volumes. As is usually the case, the academic sessions were accompanied by many opportunities for social interaction among the participants, and there was time to enjoy the historical and cultural benefits of Warsaw. Special honor was accorded to two American Assyriologists whose origins can be traced to Warsaw, Piotr Michalowski and Piotr Steinkeller, and a special session to recognize their contributions to the study of ancient Mesopotamia was organized. In this book are presented papers on the main theme of the meeting, “Fortune and Misfortune in the Ancient Near East.” The 31 essays are organized into 5 sections: (1) plenary presenations on “What Is Fortune? What Is Misfortune?” ; (2) humanity and fortune/misfortune and luck, with discussion of specific examples; (3) additional papers on definitions of fortune and misfortune; (4) the effects on city and state; and (5) God and temple.
