Download or read book Ur III Incantations from the Frau Professor Hilprecht Collection Jena written by J. J. A. van Dijk and published by Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. This book was released on 2003 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents transcriptions, translations with a full commentary of 23 Ur III incantations from Nippur now held in a collection in Jena. Geller here completes work begun by the late van Dijk in editing the tablets which were composed to combat the work of demons.
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 Assyrian and Babylonian Scholarly Text Catalogues written by Ulrike Steinert and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-06-11 with total page 692 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The reconstruction of ancient Mesopotamian medical, ritual and omen compendia and their complex history is still characterised by many difficulties, debates and gaps due to fragmentary or unpublished evidence. This book offers the first complete edition of the Assur Medical Catalogue, an 8th or 7th century BCE list of therapeutic texts, which forms a core witness for the serialisation of medical compendia in the 1st millennium BCE. The volume presents detailed analyses of this and several other related catalogues of omen series and rituals, constituting the corpora of divination and healing disciplines. The contributions discuss links between catalogues and textual sources, providing new insights into the development of compendia between serialization, standardization and diversity of local traditions. Though its a novel corpus-based approach, this volume revolutionizes the current understanding of Mesopotamian medical texts and the healing disciplines of "conjurer" and "physician". The research presented here allows one to identify core text corpora for these disciplines, as well as areas of exchange and borrowings between them.
Download or read book Women and Religion in the Ancient Near East and Asia written by Nicole Maria Brisch and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-04-03 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The recent years have seen an upswing in studies of women in the ancient Near East and related areas. This volume, which is the result of a Danish-Japanese collaboration, seeks to highlight women as actors within the sphere of the religious. In ancient Mesopotamia and other ancient civilizations, religious beliefs and practices permeated all aspects of society, and for this reason it is not possible to completely dissociate religion from politics, economy, or literature. Thus, the goal is to shift the perspective by highlighting the different ways in which the agency of women can be traced in the historical (and archaeological) record. This perspectival shift can be seen in studies of elite women, who actively contributed to (religious) gift-giving or participated in temple economies, or through showing the limits of elite women’s agency in relation to diplomatic marriages. Additionally, several contributions examine the roles of women as religious officials and the language, worship, or invocation of goddesses. This volume does not aim at completeness but seeks to highlight points for further research and new perspectives.
Download or read book Mesopotamian Eye Disease Texts written by Markham J. Geller and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is to date no comprehensive treatment of eye disease texts from ancient Mesopotamia, and no English translation of this material is available. This volume is the first complete edition and commentary on Mesopotamian medicine from Nineveh dealing with diseases of the eye. This ancient work, languishing in British Museum archives since the 19th century, is preserved on several large cuneiform manuscripts from the royal library of Ashurbanipal, from the 7th century BC. The longest surviving ancient work on diseased eyes, the text predates by several centuries corresponding Hippocratic treatises. The Nineveh series represents a systematic array of eye symptoms and therapies, also showing commonalities with Egyptian and Greco-Roman medicine. Since scholars of Near Eastern civilizations and ancient and general historians of medicine will need to be familiar with this material, the volume makes this aspect of Babylonian medicine fully accessible to both specialists and non-specialists, with all texts being fully translated into English.
Download or read book Studies in the Syriac Magical Traditions written by Marco Moriggi and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-10-25 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of the Syriac magical traditions has largely been marginalised within Syriac studies, with the earliest treatments displaying a disparaging attitude towards both the culture and its magical practices. Despite significant progress in more recent scholarship in respect of the culture, its magical practices and their associated literatures remain on the margins of the scholarly imagination. This volume aims to open a discussion on the history of the field, to evaluate how things have progressed, and to suggest a fruitful way forward. In doing so, this volume demonstrates the incredible riches contained within the Syriac magical traditions, and the necessity of their study.
Download or read book Wom b an A Cultural Narrative Reading of the Hebrew Bible Barrenness Narratives written by Janice P. De-Whyte and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Wom(b)an: A Cultural-Narrative Reading of the Hebrew Bible Barrenness Narratives Janice Pearl Ewurama De-Whyte offers a reading of the Hebrew Bible barrenness narratives. The original word “wom(b)an” visually underscores the centrality of a productive womb to female identity in the ANE and Hebrew contexts. Conversely, barrenness was the ultimate tragedy and shame of a woman. Utilizing Akan cultural custom as a lens through which to read the Hebrew barrenness tradition, De-Whyte uncovers another kind of barrenness within these narratives. Her term “social barrenness” depicts the various situations of childlessness that are generally unrecognized in western cultures due to the western biomedical definitions of infertility. Whether biological or social, barrenness was perceived to be the greatest threat to a woman’s identity and security as well as the continuity of the lineage. Wom(b)an examines these narratives in light of the cultural meanings of barrenness within traditional cultures, ancient and present.
Download or read book Lama tu written by Walter Farber and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2014-03-31 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lamaštu was one of the most important Mesopotamian demons, playing a dominant role in the magico-religious and magico-medical beliefs and practices of ancient Mesopotamia for nearly two millennia. Yet, she has never been the subject of a scholarly monograph dedicated to the textual and visual evidence for her, her activities, and the measures that ancient magical specialists took to counter her. This volume also falls short of this description, because it covers only one part of the material: it is an edition of the textual record only, which is, however, collected here as completely as seems possible today. Walter Farber, who has studied these materials for decades, presents a comprehensive collection of all of the known texts, the texts of the primary incantations in a “score” format, and transliteration and translation of a number of ancillary texts. This much-awaited volume will fill the void in the literature on this aspect of the life and thought of ancient Mesopotamian peoples regarding the character of this malevolent creature and the means of warding off the threat that she posed.
Download or read book Sources of Evil written by Greta Van Buylaere and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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)
Download or read book An Ox of One s Own written by T. M. Sharlach and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-09-11 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shulgi-simti is an important example of a woman involved in sponsoring religious activities though having a family life. An Ox of One’s Own will be of interest to Assyriologists, particularly those interested in Early Mesopotamia, and scholars working on women in religion. An Ox of One’s Own centers on the archive of a woman who died about 2050 B.C., one of King Shulgi’s many wives. Her birth name is unknown, but when she married, she became Shulgi-simti, “Suitable for Shulgi.” Attested for only about 15 years, she existed among a court filled with other wives, who probably outranked her. A religious foundation was run on her behalf whereby courtiers, male and female, donated livestock for sacrifices to an unusual mix of goddesses and gods. Previous scholarship has declared this a rare example of a queen conducting women’s religion, perhaps unusual because they say she came from abroad. The conclusions of this book are quite different. An Ox of One’s Own lays out the evidence that another woman was queen at this time in Nippur while Shulgi-simti lived in Ur and was a third-ranking concubine at best, with few economic resources. Shulgi-simti’s religious exercises concentrated on a quartet of north Babylonian goddesses.
Download or read book Ea s Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story written by Martin Worthington and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Healing Goddess Gula written by Barbara Böck and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-10-10 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing a comprehensive examination of the traits and areas of authority Ancient Babylonians attributed to their healing goddess, this book draws on a wide range of Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform sources, including god lists, literary compositions, lexical lists, prognostic texts, incantations, and prescriptions. Analysing the use of selected metaphors associated with the goddess, a new perspective is offered on the explanation for disease as well as the motivation for particular treatments. Special chapters deal with the cuneiform handbook on prognosis and diagnosis of diseases, medical incantations appealing to the healing goddess, and the medicinal plants attributed to her. For the first time a body of evidence for the use of simple drugs is brought together, elaborating on specific plant profiles. The result is a volume that challenges many long-held assumptions concerning the specialized cuneiform medical literature and takes a fresh look on the nature of Ancient Babylonian healing.
Download or read book Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic written by David Frankfurter and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the midst of academic debates about the utility of the term “magic” and the cultural meaning of ancient words like mageia or khesheph, this Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic seeks to advance the discussion by separating out three topics essential to the very idea of magic. The three major sections of this volume address (1) indigenous terminologies for ambiguous or illicit ritual in antiquity; (2) the ancient texts, manuals, and artifacts commonly designated “magical” or used to represent ancient magic; and (3) a series of contexts, from the written word to materiality itself, to which the term “magic” might usefully pertain. The individual essays in this volume cover most of Mediterranean and Near Eastern antiquity, with essays by both established and emergent scholars of ancient religions. In a burgeoning field of “magic studies” trying both to preserve and to justify critically the category itself, this volume brings new clarity and provocative insights. This will be an indispensable resource to all interested in magic in the Bible and the Ancient Near East, ancient Greece and Rome, Early Christianity and Judaism, Egypt through the Christian period, and also comparative and critical theory. Contributors are: Magali Bailliot, Gideon Bohak, Véronique Dasen, Albert de Jong, Jacco Dieleman, Esther Eidinow, David Frankfurter, Fritz Graf, Yuval Harari, Naomi Janowitz, Sarah Iles Johnston, Roy D. Kotansky, Arpad M. Nagy, Daniel Schwemer, Joseph E. Sanzo, Jacques van der Vliet, Andrew Wilburn.
Download or read book Proceedings of the 53th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale written by Leonid E. Kogan and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-06-23 with total page 1252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second half of the proceedings, City Administration in the Ancient Near East, is available here. A workshop volume is available here. In July 2007, the 53rd Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale (the annual meeting of the International Association of Assyriologists) was held in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia. In Moscow, several hundred Assyriologists enjoyed the hospitality of the Russian State University for the Humanities. Dozens of papers on the topic “Language in the Ancient Near East,” were delivered at the University. More than 50 of those papers are published in this 2-volume set.
Download or read book The Scribes and Scholars of the City of Emar in the Late Bronze Age written by Yoram Cohen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-08-14 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to place Emar's scribal school institution within its social and historical context.
Download or read book Mesopotamian Medicine and Magic written by Strahil V. Panayotov and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-10-22 with total page 968 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mesopotamian Medicine and Magic. Studies in Honour of Markham J. Geller is a thematically focused collection of 34 brand-new essays bringing to light a representative selection of the rich and varied scientific and technical knowledge produced chiefly by the cuneiform cultures. The contributions concentrate mainly on Mesopotamian scholarly descriptions and practices of diagnosing and healing diverse physical ailments and mental distress. The festschrift contains both critical editions of new texts as well as analytical studies dealing with various issues of Mesopotamian medical and magical lore. Currently, this is the largest edited volume devoted to this topic, significantly contributing to the History of Ancient Sciences.
Download or read book Tradition and Innovation in the Ancient Near East written by Alfonso Archi and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-01-23 with total page 633 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In July, 2011, the International Association for Assyriology met in Rome, Italy, for 5 days to deliver and listen to papers on the theme “Tradition and Innovation in the Ancient Near East”. This volume, the proceedings of the conference, contains more than 40 of the papers read at the 57th annual Rencontre, including 3 plenary lectures/papers, many papers directly connected with the theme, as well as a workshop on parents and children. The papers covered every period of Mesopotamian history, from the third millennium through the end of the first millennium B.C.E. The attendees were warmly hosted by faculty and students from the Università di Roma “La Sapienza”.
