Download or read book Bodies of Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia written by Matthew Rutz and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Bodies of Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia Matthew Rutz explores the relationship between ancient collections of texts, commonly deemed libraries and archives, and the modern interpretation of titles like ‘diviner’. By looking at cuneiform tablets as artifacts with archaeological contexts, this work probes the modern analytical categories used to study ancient diviners and investigates the transmission of Babylonian/Assyrian scholarship in Syria. During the Late Bronze Age diviners acted as high-ranking scribes and cultic functionaries in Emar, a town on the Syrian Euphrates (ca. 1375-1175 BCE). This book’s centerpiece is an extensive analytical catalogue of the excavated tablet collection of one family of diviners. Over seventy-five fragments are identified for the first time, along with many proposed joins between fragments.
Download or read book Ancient Knowledge Networks written by Eleanor Robson and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2019-11-14 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient Knowledge Networks is a book about how knowledge travels, in minds and bodies as well as in writings. It explores the forms knowledge takes and the meanings it accrues, and how these meanings are shaped by the peoples who use it.Addressing the relationships between political power, family ties, religious commitments and literate scholarship in the ancient Middle East of the first millennium BC, Eleanor Robson focuses on two regions where cuneiform script was the predominant writing medium: Assyria in the north of modern-day Syria and Iraq, and Babylonia to the south of modern-day Baghdad. She investigates how networks of knowledge enabled cuneiform intellectual culture to endure and adapt over the course of five world empires until its eventual demise in the mid-first century BC. In doing so, she also studies Assyriological and historical method, both now and over the past two centuries, asking how the field has shaped and been shaped by the academic concerns and fashions of the day. Above all, Ancient Knowledge Networks is an experiment in writing about ‘Mesopotamian science’, as it has often been known, using geographical and social approaches to bring new insights into the intellectual history of the world’s first empires.
Download or read book Secrecy and the Gods written by Alan Lenzi and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secrecy and the Gods is a comparative mythological study of the human reception and treatment of divine secret knowledge in ancient Mesopotamia and biblical Israel. The human royal council was the social model for ancient ideas about divine knowledge being secret - just as human kings had secrets so too did the gods. Diviners who received this knowledge from the gods in an on-going, ad hoc manner were an essential link between the divine assembly and the human royal council for whom such knowledge was intended. Scribes eventually adapted the ad hoc divinatory means of receiving divine communications to their culturally significant texts. By discursively asserting a historical connection between themselves and unique mediators with a close divine affiliation (the apkallus and Moses), the scribes constructed myths that legitimated their texts as divine revelation and claimed these were received in history through normal scribal channels. In this manner, scribes fixed the secret of the gods permanently among humans in textualized form that valorized their own position within society. Although the origin of divine secret knowledge was rooted in a common mythological idea of the divine assembly, its treatment was quite distinct. The Mesopotamians guarded divine secret knowledge through various scribal means, including the attachment of a Geheimwissen colophon to certain tablets (treated exhaustively), whereas biblical Israel published it openly. The contrast in treatment of divine secret knowledge was directly related to different mytho-political self-understandings: Mesopotamia's imperial aspirations versus biblical Israel's vassaldom. As vassals to Yahweh, the divine imperial king, the kings of Judah and Israel as presented in the biblical material were not to formulate secret orders; they were only to obey them.
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 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 Ancient Mesopotamia written by A. Leo Oppenheim and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-01-31 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This splendid work of scholarship . . . sums up with economy and power all that the written record so far deciphered has to tell about the ancient and complementary civilizations of Babylon and Assyria."—Edward B. Garside, New York Times Book Review Ancient Mesopotamia—the area now called Iraq—has received less attention than ancient Egypt and other long-extinct and more spectacular civilizations. But numerous small clay tablets buried in the desert soil for thousands of years make it possible for us to know more about the people of ancient Mesopotamia than any other land in the early Near East. Professor Oppenheim, who studied these tablets for more than thirty years, used his intimate knowledge of long-dead languages to put together a distinctively personal picture of the Mesopotamians of some three thousand years ago. Following Oppenheim's death, Erica Reiner used the author's outline to complete the revisions he had begun. "To any serious student of Mesopotamian civilization, this is one of the most valuable books ever written."—Leonard Cottrell, Book Week "Leo Oppenheim has made a bold, brave, pioneering attempt to present a synthesis of the vast mass of philological and archaeological data that have accumulated over the past hundred years in the field of Assyriological research."—Samuel Noah Kramer, Archaeology A. Leo Oppenheim, one of the most distinguished Assyriologists of our time, was editor in charge of the Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute and John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Chicago.
Download or read book Ancient Mesopotamian Religion and Beliefs written by Laura Loria and published by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. This book was released on 2016-07-15 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The religion of ancient Mesopotamia was rich and varied. Readers will learn about the colorful major gods, as well as several lesser gods. They will also get insight into the structure and rituals of the religion, such as the roles of the priests and kings and their relationships to the gods. This instructive book also explains how astronomy and the constellations figured into their worship. Readers will be captivated by explanations about the healing aspect of ancient Mesopotamian religion and gain a deeper understanding of how these fascinating people viewed the afterlife.
Download or read book Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary written by John Z Wee and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-12-09 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary explores the dynamic between scholastic rhetoric and medical knowledge in ancient commentaries on a Mesopotamian Diagnostic Handbook, whose atypical language and ideas were harmonized with conventional ways of perceiving and describing the sick body.
Download or read book Archaeology and Apprenticeship written by Willeke Wendrich and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archaeologists study a wide array of material remains to propose conclusions about non-material aspects of culture. The intricacies of these findings have increased over recent decades, but only limited attention has been paid to what the archaeological record can tell us about the transfer of cultural knowledge through apprenticeship. Apprenticeship is broadly defined as the transmission of culture through a formal or informal teacher–pupil relationship. This collection invites a wide discussion, citing case studies from all over the world and yet focuses the scholarship into a concise set of contributions. The chapters in this volume demonstrate how archaeology can benefit greatly from the understanding of the social dimensions of knowledge transfer. This book also examines apprenticeship in archaeology against a backdrop of sociological and cognitive psychology literature, to enrich the understanding of the relationship between material remains and enculturation. Each of the authors in this collection looks specifically at how material remains can reveal several specific aspects of ancient cultures: What is the human potential for learning? How do people learn? Who is teaching? Why are they learning? What are the results of such learning? How do we recognize knowledge transfer in the archaeological record? These fundamental questions are featured in various forms in all chapters of the book. With case studies from the American Southwest, Alaska, Egypt, Ancient Greece, and Mesopotamia, this book will have broad appeal for scholars—particularly those concerned with cultural transmission and traditions of learning and education—all over the world.
Download or read book The Loss of Male Sexual Desire in Ancient Mesopotamia written by Gioele Zisa and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-11-22 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After more than fifty years since the last publication, the cuneiform texts relating to the treatment of the loss of male sexual desire and vigor in Mesopotamia are collected in this volume. The aim of the book is to present Mesopotamian medical tradition regarding the so-called nīš libbi therapies. šà-zi-ga in Sumerian, nīš libbi in Akkadian, lit. "raising of the 'heart'", is the expression used to indicate a group of texts intended to recover the male sexual desire. This medical tradition is preserved from the Middle Babylonian period to the Achaemenid one. This broad range testifies to the importance of the transmission of this material throughout Mesopotamian history. The book provides the edition of this textual corpus and analyzes it in the light of new knowledge on ancient Near Eastern medicine. Moreover, this volume aims to show how theories and methodologies of Cultural Anthropology, Ethnopsychiatry and Gender Studies are useful for understanding the Mesopotamian medical system. This edition is an important tool for understanding Mesopotamian medical knowledge for Assyriologist, however since the texts have been translated and discussed using the anthropological and gender perspectives they are accessible also to scholars of other research fields, such as History of Medicine, Sexuality and Gender.
Download or read book Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti Witchcraft Rituals written by Tzvi Abusch and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the most important sources for understanding the cultures and systems of thought of ancient Mesopotamia is a large body of magical and medical texts written in the Sumerian and Akkadian languages. An especially significant branch of this literature centers upon witchcraft. Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft rituals and incantations attribute ill-health and misfortune to the magic machinations of witches and prescribe ceremonies, devices, and treatments for dispelling witchcraft, destroying the witch, and protecting and curing the patient. The Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals aims to present a reconstruction of this body of texts; it provides critical editions of the relevant rituals and prescriptions based on the study of the cuneiform tablets and fragments recovered from the libraries of ancient Mesopotamia.
Download or read book The Comparable Body written by John Z. Wee and published by Studies in Ancient Medicine. This book was released on 2017 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Mesopotamia written by Ariane Thomas and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2020 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mesopotamia, in modern-day Iraq, was home to the remarkable ancient civilizations of Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia, and Assyria. From the rise of the first cities around 3500 BCE, through the mighty empires of Nineveh and Babylon, to the demise of its native culture around 100 CE, Mesopotamia produced some of the most powerful and captivating art of antiquity and led the world in astronomy, mathematics, and other sciences—a legacy that lives on today. Mesopotamia: Civilization Begins presents a rich panorama of ancient Mesopotamia’s history, from its earliest prehistoric cultures to its conquest by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE. This catalogue records the beauty and variety of the objects on display, on loan from the Louvre’s unparalleled collection of ancient Near Eastern antiquities: cylinder seals, monumental sculptures, cuneiform tablets, jewelry, glazed bricks, paintings, figurines, and more. Essays by international experts explore a range of topics, from the earliest French excavations to Mesopotamia’s economy, religion, cities, cuneiform writing, rulers, and history—as well as its enduring presence in the contemporary imagination.
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 Mesopotamian Civilization written by Daniel T. Potts and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Likely to become a standard work for students of the ancient Near East, and for those interested in the high cultures of the region, this account is also a highly accessible repository of information valuable to archaeologists, anthropologists, etc
Download or read book The Circulation of Astronomical Knowledge in the Ancient World written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-04-18 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Astronomical and astrological knowledge circulated in many ways in the ancient world: in the form of written texts and through oral communication; by the conscious assimilation of sought-after knowledge and the unconscious absorption of ideas to which scholars were exposed. The Circulation of Astronomical Knowledge in the Ancient World explores the ways in which astronomical knowledge circulated between different communities of scholars over time and space, and what was done with that knowledge when it was received. Examples are discussed from Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Greco-Roman world, India, and China.
Download or read book Ancient Mesopotamia written by Susan Pollock and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-05-20 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Innovative study of the early state and urban societies in Mesopotamia, c. 5000 to 2100 BC.
