Download or read book Conditional Structures in Mesopotamian Old Babylonian written by Eran Cohen and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2012-10-08 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines conditional structures in Old Babylonian from a linguistic point of view, drawing on a corpus of letters, law collections, and omens. All of the conditional patterns are provided with a syntactic characterization, so that each conditional sequence is differentiated from all other potential sequences. The volume includes detailed discussion about the values of various verbal and other predicative forms in the conditional structures occurring in the corpus, the differences between superficially similar conditional patterns, and the functions of the various conditional patterns. Many traditionally difficult points are treated and given suitable solutions. The concluding sections of each chapter include linguistic glosses and more general discussions that provide linguistic typologists a window onto the conditional system of Old Babylonian.
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 A Grammar of Old Assyrian written by N.J.C. Kouwenberg and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-05-09 with total page 947 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Grammar of Old Assyrian is a grammar of the earliest stage of Assyrian (1900-1700 BC), a Semitic language that is one of the main varieties of Akkadian, and describes the language of a community of Assyrian merchants living in Anatolia.
Download or read book Ancient States and Infrastructural Power written by Clifford Ando and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient States and Infrastructural Power examines how early states built their territorial, legal, and political powers before they had the capacity to enforce them. Contributors trace how state power first developed from the Andes to China, from Babylon to Rome.
Download or read book Afroasiatic written by Mauro Tosco and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2018-01-15 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The articles in the present volume offer an updated view of the breadth of theoretical and empirical research being carried on in the different subgroups of the Afroasiatic phylum. They are written by leading specialists and are representative of widely different perspectives and interests, from the analysis of data from scarcely known varieties to the reappraisal of old debates (such as the value of the Classical Arabic verbal forms). Reflecting a great diversity of language structures and functions, the articles are grouped into three broad areas: the phylum as such in its classificatory and typological aspects; the analysis of the intricate morphology of Afroasiatic and its developments; and the syntax of Afroasiatic in its widest sense, from the clause to the sentence and beyond. They witness how Afroasiatic, with its unsurpassed historical depth and immense geographical breadth, keeps representing a constant source of fascinating data and implications for linguistic theory.
Download or read book Law and Dis Order in the Ancient Near East written by Katrien De Graef and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2021-05-27 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mesopotamia is often considered to be the birthplace of law codes. In recognition of this fact and motivated by the perennial interest in the topic among Assyriologists, the 59th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale was organized in Ghent in 2013 around the theme “Law and (Dis)Order in the Ancient Near East.” Based on papers delivered at that meeting, this volume contains twenty-six essays that focus on archaeological, philological, and historical topics related to order and chaos in the Ancient Near East. Written by a diverse array of international scholars, the contributions to this book explore laws and legal practices in the Ur III, Old Babylonian, Middle Assyrian, and Neo-Assyrian periods in Mesopotamia, as well as in Nuzi and the Hebrew Bible. Among the subjects covered are the Code of Hammurabi, legal phraseology, the archaeological traces of the organization of community life, and biblical law. The volume also contains essays that explore the concepts of chaos/disorder and law/order in divinatory texts and literature. Wide-ranging and cutting-edge, the essays in this collection will be of interest to Assyriologists, especially members of the International Association for Assyriology.
Download or read book Studies in the Grammar and Lexicon of Neo Aramaic written by Geoffrey Khan and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2021-01-15 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Neo-Aramaic dialects are modern vernacular forms of Aramaic, which has a documented history in the Middle East of over 3,000 years. Due to upheavals in the Middle East over the last one hundred years, thousands of speakers of Neo-Aramaic dialects have been forced to migrate from their homes or have perished in massacres. As a result, the dialects are now highly endangered. The dialects exhibit a remarkable diversity of structures. Moreover, the considerable depth of attestation of Aramaic from earlier periods provides evidence for pathways of change. For these reasons the research of Neo-Aramaic is of importance for more general fields of linguistics, in particular language typology and historical linguistics. The papers in this volume represent the full range of research that is currently being carried out on Neo-Aramaic dialects. They advance the field in numerous ways. In order to allow linguists who are not specialists in Neo-Aramaic to benefit from the papers, the examples are fully glossed.
Download or read book History of the Akkadian Language 2 vols written by Juan-Pablo Vita and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-08-09 with total page 1677 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History of the Akkadian Language offers a detailed chronological survey of the oldest known Semitic language and one of history’s longest written records. The outcome is presented in 26 chapters written by 25 leading authors.
Download or read book Most Probably written by Nathan Wasserman and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The system that any language uses to express evaluations, judgments, estimations, and non-real situations tends to be complicated and poorly understood, and this has certainly been the case, historically, for Akkadian. In this study, Nathan Wasserman presents the fruit of 15 years of study of the epistemic modal system of Old Babylonian, which represents one of the better-known and best-documented periods of the Akkadian language. As Wasserman notes, the interplay of philology, linguistics, and psychology that are involved in understanding any modal system make coming to conclusions a difficult enterprise. And though many questions remain unanswered, in this clearly organized and presented monograph, he guides the reader through a study of each modal word/particle, its etymology, syntax, and usage, on the basis of an examination of most of the Old Babylonian examples published thus far. He thus arrives at a general view of epistemic modality in Old Babylonian. Wasserman’s monograph is a work that will add significantly to our understanding of Old Babylonian language and the interpretation of texts and will become the benchmark for further study of verbal modality in Akkadian and other Semitic languages.
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 495 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 Historical Aspects of Standard Negation in Semitic written by Ambjörn Sjörs and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Historical Aspects of Standard Negation in Semitic Ambjörn Sjörs investigates the grammar of standard negation in a wide selection of Semitic languages. The bulk of the investigation consists of a detailed analysis of negative constructions and is based on a first-hand examination of the examples in context. The main issues that are investigated in the book relate to the historical change of the expression of verbal negation in Semitic and the reconstruction of the genealogical relationship of negative constructions. It shows how negation is constantly renewed from the reanalysis of emphatic negative constructions, and how structural asymmetries between negative constructions and the corresponding affirmative constructions arise from the linguistically conservative nature of negative vis-à-vis affirmative clauses.
Download or read book Ancient Egyptian and Afroasiatic written by María Victoria Almansa-Villatoro and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2023-08-23 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By challenging assumptions regarding the proximity between Egyptian and Semitic Languages, Ancient Egyptian and Afroasiatic provides a fresh approach to the relationships and similarities between Ancient Egyptian, Semitic, and Afroasiatic languages. This in-depth analysis includes a re-examination of the methodologies deployed in historical linguistics and comparative grammar, a morphological study of Ancient Egyptian, and critical comparisons between Ancient Egyptian and Semitic, as well as careful considerations of environmental factors and archaeological evidence. These contributions offer a reassessment of the Afroasiatic phylum, which is based on the relations between Ancient Egyptian and the other Afroasiatic branches. This volume illustrates the advantages of viewing Ancient Egyptian in its African context. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this collection include Shiferaw Assefa, Michael Avina, Vit Bubenik, Leo Depuydt, Christopher Ehret, Zygmunt Frajzyngier, J. Lafayette Gaston, Tiffany Gleason, John Huehnergard, Andrew Kitchen, Elsa Oréal, Chelsea Sanker, Lameen Souag, Andréas Stauder, Deven N. Vyas, Aren Wilson-Wright, and Jean Winand.
Download or read book A Grammar of the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts Vol I Unis written by James P. Allen and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2017-05-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Grammar of the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts is designed as a six-volume study of the earliest comprehensive corpus of ancient Egyptian texts, inscribed in the pyramids of five pharaohs of the Old Kingdom (ca. 2325–2150 BC) and several of their queens. The first volume, devoted to the earliest corpus, that of Unis, is based on a database that allows for detailed analysis of the orthography of the texts and every aspect of their grammar; it includes a complete hieroglyphic lexicon of the texts and a consecutive transcription and translation on facing pages. The grammatical analysis incorporates both the most recent advances in the understanding of Egyptian grammar and a few new interpretations published here for the first time.
Download or read book B l Li ni written by Rebecca Hasselbach-Andee and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2022-06-30 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Akkadian, a Semitic language attested in writing from 2600 BCE until the first century CE, was the language of Mesopotamia for nearly three millennia. This volume examines the language from a comparative and historical linguistic perspective. Inspired by the work of renowned linguist John Huehnergard and featuring contributions from top scholars in the field, Bēl Lišāni showcases the latest research on Akkadian linguistics. Chapters focus on a wide range of topics, including lexicon, morphology, word order, syntax, verbal semantics, and subgrouping. Building upon Huehnergard’s pioneering studies focused on the identification of Proto-Akkadian features, the contributors explore linguistic innovations in the language from historical and comparative perspectives. In doing so, they open the way for further etymological, dialectical, and lexical research into Akkadian. An important update on and synthesis of the research in Akkadian linguistics, this volume will be welcomed by Semitists, Akkadian language specialists, and scholars and students interested in historical linguistics. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Paul-Alain Beaulieu, Øyvind Bjøru, Maksim Kalinin, N. J. C. Kouwenberg, Sergey Loesov, Jacob J. de Ridder, Ambjörn Sjörs, Michael P. Streck, and Juan-Pablo Vita.
Download or read book A Grammar of the Hittite Language written by Harry A. Hoffner Jr. and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2024-09-04 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Designed to accompany A Grammar of the Hittite Language, Part 1: Reference Grammar, this tutorial guides language learners through a series of graded lessons with illustrative sentences for translation drawn from actual Hittite texts. The tutorial is keyed to the reference grammar and provides extensive and updated notes, a vocabulary list for each lesson, and a comprehensive glossary.
Download or read book Motion Voice and Mood in the Semitic Verb written by Henning Ambjörn Sjörs and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2022-11-18 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the relationship between the so-called ventive morpheme in Akkadian (-am) and the related suffixes -n and -a in other Semitic languages, including Amarna Canaanite, Ugaritic, Hebrew, and Arabic. Using formal reconstructions of the various morphemes and a functional analysis of their different usages, Ambjörn Sjörs convincingly argues that these endings are cognate morphemes that were formally and functionally related to the ventive morpheme in Akkadian. Sjörs provides a systematic description of non-allative ventive verbs in Old Babylonian, the energic and volitive in Amarna Canaanite, the energic and lengthened prefix conjugation in Ugaritic, the lengthened imperfect consecutive in Biblical Hebrew, and the subjunctive and energic in Classical Arabic. Sjörs explains how these verb forms were used within the framework of grammaticalization theory and demonstrates how the suffixes are historically related. Clearly and persuasively argued, Motion, Voice, and Mood in the Semitic Verb sheds valuable light on the Akkadian ventive and its relationship to the other related morphemes. It will be welcomed by linguists specializing in Akkadian, Amarna Canaanite, Ugaritic, Hebrew, and Arabic.
Download or read book Coptic written by James P. Allen and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2020-11-25 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coptic is the final stage of the ancient Egyptian language, written in an alphabet derived primarily from Greek instead of hieroglyphs. It borrows some vocabulary from ancient Greek, and it was used primarily for writing Christian scriptures and treatises. There is no uniform Coptic language, but rather six major dialects. Unlike previous grammars that focus on just two of the Coptic dialects, this volume, written by senior Egyptologist James P. Allen, describes the grammar of the language in each of the six major dialects. It also includes exercises with an answer key, a chrestomathy, and an accompanying dictionary, making it suitable for teaching or self-guided learning as well as general reference.
