Download or read book Sumerian Model Contracts from the Old Babylonian Period in the Hilprecht Collection Jena written by Gabriella Spada and published by Harrassowitz. This book was released on 2018 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Old Babylonian period (ca. 2002-1595 B.C.), the city of Nippur was a primary center for transmission of Sumerian culture, and its scribal schools (called edubba in Sumerian, lit. "the house of the tablets") had a great reputation throughout ancient Mesopotamia. The function of the edubba was twofold: to train the scribes in the skills of their profession, equipping them to record day-to-day affairs, and to preserve and pass on their cultural heritage. In the last phase of early education, pupils were trained comprehensively in the formal rhetoric of administration and law by compilations of the so-called "model contracts," together with "model court cases," legal phrasebooks and collections of legal principles. While they were not functional documents, but simply didactic tools (being stripped of incidental details, such as list of witnesses and date), model contracts follow the common patterns of Sumerian contract types and represent a comprehensive assortment of all possible transactions that the ancient Mesopotamian administration might have been required to draw up in everyday economic life: barley and silver loans; deeds of real estate, field or slave sale; marriage contracts; adoptions, and so on. The book contains the publication of the Sumerian model contracts from Old Babylonian Nippur kept in the Hilprecht Collection, Jena. The edition provides transliterations, translations, commentaries of the entire corpus and of some duplicates kept in other cuneiform collections; the indexes comprise personal names, deities, toponyms and a glossary. Finally, the plates at the end of the volume offer handcopies and photographs of all the HS tablets.
Download or read book Sumerian Model Contracts from the Old Babylonian Period in the Hilprecht Collection Jena written by Gabriella Spada and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Old Babylonian Texts in the Sch yen Collection Part Two written by A. R. George and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2019-08-15 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In ancient Mesopotamia, men training to be scribes copied model letters in order to practice writing and familiarize themselves with epistolary forms and expressions. Similarly, model contracts were used to teach them how to draw up agreements for the transactions typical of everyday economic life. This volume makes available a trove of previously unknown tablets and fragments, now housed in the Shøyen Collection, that were produced in the training of scribes in Old Babylonian schools. Following on Old Babylonian Texts in the Schøyen Collection, Part One: Selected Letters, this volume publishes the contents of sixty-five tablets bearing Akkadian letters used to train scribes and twenty-six prisms and tablets carrying Sumerian legal texts copied in the same context. Each text is presented in transliterated form and in translation, with appropriate commentary and annotations and, at the end of the book, photographs of the cuneiform. The material is made easily navigable by a catalogue, bibliography, and indexes. This collection of previously unknown documents expands the extant corpus of educational texts, making an essential contribution to the study of the ancient world.
Download or read book Making a Case written by Sara J. Milstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-11 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Outside of the Bible, all of the known Near Eastern law collections were produced in the third to second millennia BCE, in cuneiform on clay tablets, and in major cities in Mesopotamia and in the Hittite Empire. None of the major sites in Syria that have yielded cuneiform tablets has borne even a fragment of a law collection, even though several have produced ample legal documentation. Excavations at Nuzi have also turned up numerous legal documents, but again, no law collection. Even Egypt has not yielded a collection of laws. As such, the biblical texts that scholars regularly identify as law collections represent the only "western," non-cuneiform expressions of the genre in the ancient Near East, produced by societies not known for their political clout, and separated in time from "other" collections by centuries. Making a Case: The Practical Roots of Biblical Law challenges the long-held notion that Israelite and Judahite scribes either made use of "old" law collections or set out to produce law collections in the Near Eastern sense of the genre. Instead, what we call "biblical law" is closer in form and function to another, oft-neglected Mesopotamian genre: legal-pedagogical texts. During their education, Mesopotamian scribes studied a variety of legal-oriented school texts, including sample contracts, fictional cases, short sequences of laws, and legal phrasebooks. When biblical law is viewed in the context of these legal-pedagogical texts from Mesopotamia, its practical roots in a set of comparable legal exercises begin to emerge.
Download or read book The Laws of Hammurabi written by Pamela Barmash and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-24 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the best-known and most esteemed people known from antiquity is the Babylonian king Hammurabi. His fame and reputation are due to the collection of laws written under his patronage. This book offers an innovative interpretation of the Laws of Hammurabi. Ancient scribes would demonstrate their legal flair by composing statutes on a set of traditional cases, articulating what they deemed just and fair. The scribe of the Laws of Hammurabi advanced beyond earlier scribes in composing statutes that manifest systematization and implicit legal principles, and inserted the Laws of Hammurabi into the form of a royal inscription, shrewdly reshaping the genre. This tradition of scribal improvisation on a set of traditional cases continued outside of Mesopotamia. It influenced biblical law and the law of the Hittite empire significantly. The Laws of Hammurabi was also witness to the start of another stream of intellectual tradition. It became the subject of formal commentaries, marking a profound cultural shift. Scribes related to it in ways that diverged from prior attitudes; it became an object of study and of commentary, a genre that names itself as dependent on another text. The famous Laws of Hammurabi is here given the extensive attention it continues to merit.
Download or read book The Scribe in the Biblical World written by Esther Eshel and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-12-05 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a fresh look at the status of the scribe in society, his training, practices, and work in the biblical world. What was the scribe’s role in these societies? Were there rival scribal schools? What was their role in daily life? How many scripts and languages did they grasp? Did they master political and religious rhetoric? Did they travel or share foreign traditions, cultures, and beliefs? Were scribes redactors, or simply copyists? What was their influence on the redaction of the Bible? How did they relate to the political and religious powers of their day? Did they possess any authority themselves? These are the questions that were tackled during an international conference held at the University of Strasbourg on June 17–19, 2019. The conference served as the basis for this publication, which includes fifteen articles covering a wide geographical and chronological range, from Late Bronze Age royal scribes to refugees in Masada at the end of the Second Temple period.
Download or read book Studies of Bactrian Legal Documents written by Hossein Sheikh and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-12-05 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies of Bactrian Legal Documents deals with the legal practice in Greater Khorasan between the 4th and 8th centuries CE.
Download or read book Back to School in Babylonia written by Susanne Paulus and published by Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures. This book was released on 2023-09-15 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume—the companion book to the special exhibition Back to School in Babylonia of the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures of the University of Chicago—explores education in the Old Babylonian period through the lens of House F in Nippur, excavated jointly by the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1950s and widely believed to have been a scribal school. The book's twenty essays offer a state-of-the-art synthesis of research on the history of House F and the educational curriculum documented on the many tablets discovered there, while the catalog's five chapters present the 126 objects included in the exhibition, the vast majority of them cuneiform tablets.
Download or read book Translation as Scholarship written by Jay Crisostomo and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-01-14 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first half of the 2d millennium BCE, translation occasionally depicted semantically incongruous correspondences. Such cases reflect ancient scribes substantiating their virtuosity with cuneiform writing by capitalizing on phonologic, graphemic, semantic, and other resemblances in the interlingual space. These scholar–scribes employed an essential scribal practice, analogical hermeneutics, an interpretative activity grounded in analogical reasoning and empowered by the potentiality of the cuneiform script. Scribal education systematized such practices, allowing scribes to utilize these habits in copying compositions and creating translations. In scribal education, analogical hermeneutics is exemplified in the word list "Izi", both in its structure and in its occasional bilingualism. By examining "Izi" as a product of the social field of scribal education, this book argues that scribes used analogical hermeneutics to cultivate their craft and establish themselves as knowledgeable scribes. Within a linguistic epistemology of cuneiform scribal culture, translation is a tool in the hands of a knowledgeable scholar.
Download or read book The Old Babylonian Administrative Texts in the Hilprecht Collection Jena Texts seal impressions studies written by Anne Goddeeris and published by Harrassowitz. This book was released on 2016 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1900-1700 BC), Nippur, the religious capital of Babylonia, was a center of cultural and economic activities. Excavations have yielded, beside numerous literary compositions, a variety of documents concerning urban and temple administration as well as economic activities and property management of the priestly families. The book contains the publication of the legal and administrative documents from Old Babylonian Nippur kept in the Hilprecht Collection, Jena. The edition provides transliterations, translations, commentaries, hand copies, and photographs (on CD-ROM) of all texts. The indexes comprise personal names, toponyms, professions, deities, year-names, and a glossary. A separate chapter by Ursula Seidl discusses the iconography of seal impressions on the tablets. The legal documents are keystones of the family archives excavated by the Babylonian Expedition. The book also includes a discussion of the activities related in these archives and of the families who kept them. The administrative documents predominantly belong to a single archive and are characterized by an unusual dating system. The archive keeps track of sections of the management of the city and its temples.
Download or read book The Old Babylonian Merchant written by W. F. Leemans and published by Brill Archive. This book was released on 1950 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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: “A readable and up-to-date introduction to a most fascinating culture” from a world-renowned Sumerian scholar (American Journal of Archaeology). 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. “An uncontested authority on the civilization of Sumer, Professor Kramer writes with grace and urbanity.” —Library Journal
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 The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic written by A. R. George and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 802 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Babylonian Gilgamesh epic is the oldest long poem in the world, with a history going back four thousand years. It tells the fascinating and moving story of Gilgamesh's heroic deeds and lonely quest for immortality. This book collects for the first time all the known sources in the original cuneiform, including many fragments never published before. The author's personal study of every available fragment has produced a definitive edition and translation, complete with comprehensive introductory chapters that place the poem and its hero in context."--Publisher's description.
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 Babylonian Topographical Texts written by A. R. George and published by Peeters Publishers. This book was released on 1992 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Babylonian Topographical Texts collects for the first time all Babylonian and Assyrian texts of the first millennium B.C. that belong to what is designated the topographical genre. Much of the material is not previously published. The book is largely concerned with Babylon. Seventeen texts on this city now allow its topography to be properly understood for the first time. Another seventeen texts concern the cities of Nippur, Assur, Kish and Uruk. Also included are thirty miscellaneous texts, mostly new, which bear upon topographical matters. The text editions and translations are supplemented by a philological and topical commentary. The work is concluded with full indices, and 57 plates of cuneiform copies.
Download or read book A History of Ancient Near Eastern Law 2 vols written by Raymond Westbrook and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2003-08-01 with total page 1235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive survey of the world's oldest known legal systems, this collaborative work of twenty-two scholars covers over 3,000 years of legal history of the Ancient Near East. Each of the book's chapters represents a review of the law of a particular period and region, e.g. the Egyptian Old Kingdom, by a specialist in that area. Within each chapter, the material is organized under standardized legal categories (e.g. constitutional law, family law) that make for easy cross-referencing. The chapters are arranged chronologically by millennium and within each millennium by the three major politico-cultural spheres of the region: Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia and the Levant. An introduction by the editor discusses the general character of Ancient Near Eastern Law.
