Download or read book The Class Reunion An Annotated Translation and Commentary on the Sumerian Dialogue Two Scribes written by J. Cale Johnson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-07-28 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Class Reunion—An Annotated Translation and Commentary on the Sumerian Dialogue Two Scribes, J. Cale Johnson and Markham J. Geller present a critical edition, translation and commentary on the Sumerian scholastic dialogue otherwise known as Two Scribes, Streit zweier Schulabsolventen or Dialogue 1. The two protagonists, the Professor and the Bureaucrat, each ridicule their opponent in alternating speeches, while at the same time scoring points based on their detailed knowledge of Sumerian lexical and literary traditions. But they also represent the two social roles into which nearly all graduates of the Old Babylonian Tablet House typically gained entrance. So the dialogue also reflects on larger themes such as professional identity and the nature of scholastic activity in Mesopotamia in the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1800–1600 BCE).
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 Comparable Body Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Mesopotamian Egyptian and Greco Roman Medicine written by John Z Wee and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-11-13 with total page 457 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 Disputation Literature in the Near East and Beyond written by Enrique Jiménez and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-08-10 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disputation literature is a type of text in which usually two non-human entities (such as trees, animals, drinks, or seasons) try to establish their superiority over each other by means of a series of speeches written in an elaborate, flowery register. As opposed to other dialogue literature, in disputation texts there is no serious matter at stake only the preeminence of one of the litigants over its rival. These light-hearted texts are known in virtually every culture that flourished in the Middle East from Antiquity to the present day, and they constitute one of the most enduring genres in world literature. The present volume collects over twenty contributions on disputation literature by a diverse group of world-renowned scholars. From ancient Sumer to modern-day Bahrain, from Egyptian to Neo-Aramaic, including Latin, French, Middle English, Armenian, Chinese and Japanese, the chapters of this book study the multiple avatars of this venerable text type.
Download or read book Mesopotamian Commentaries on the Diagnostic Handbook Sa gig written by John Z Wee and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-12-16 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mesopotamian Commentaries on the Diagnostic Handbook Sa-gig is intended for specialists in cuneiform studies, and includes a cuneiform edition, English translation, and notes on medical lexicography for thirty Sa-gig commentary tablets and fragments, as well as a study on technical notations recurring in these commentaries. Within the Cuneiform Monographs series, this book represents a companion volume to Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary (Brill, 2019).
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 is intended for historians of medicine and interpretation, and explores the dynamic between scholastic rhetoric and medical knowledge in ancient commentaries on a Mesopotamian Diagnostic Handbook. In line with commentators’ self-fashioning as experts of diverse disciplines, commentaries display intertextuality involving a variety of lexical, astronomical, religious, magic, and literary compositions, while employing patterns of argumentation that resist categorization within any single branch of knowledge. Commentators’ choices of topics and comments, however, sought to harmonize atypical language and ideas in the Handbook with conventional ways of perceiving and describing the sick body in therapeutic recipes. Scholastic rhetoric—supposedly unfettered to any discipline—served in fact as a pretext for affirming current forms of medical knowledge.
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 Gender and methodology in the ancient Near East Approaches from Assyriology and beyond written by Stephanie Lynn Budin and published by Edicions Universitat Barcelona. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of 23 essays, presented in three sections, aims to discuss women’s studies as well as methodological and theoretical approaches to gender within the broad framework of ancient Near Eastern studies. The first section, comprising most of the contributions, is devoted to Assyriology and ancient Near Eastern archaeology. The second and third sections are devoted to Egyptology and to ancient Israel and biblical studies respectively, neighbouring fields of research included in the volume to enrich the debate and facilitate academic exchange. Altogether these essays offer a variety of sources and perspectives, from the textual to the archaeological, from bodies and sexuality to onomastics, to name just a few, making this a useful resource for all those interested in the study of women and gender in the past.
Download or read book In the Wake of the Compendia written by J. Cale Johnson and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-11-13 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Wake of the Compendia presents papers that examine the history of technical compendia as they moved between institutions and societies in ancient and medieval Mesopotamia. This volume offers new perspectives on the development and transmission of technical compilations, looking especially at the relationship between empirical knowledge and textual transmission in early scientific thinking. The eleven contributions to the volume derive from a panel held at the American Oriental Society in 2013 and cover more than three millennia of historical development, ranging from Babylonian medicine and astronomy to the persistence of Mesopotamian lore in Syriac and Arabic meditations on the properties of animals. The volume also includes major contributions on the history of Mesopotamian “rationality,” epistemic labels for tested and tried remedies, and the development of depersonalized case histories in Babylonian therapeutic compendia. Together, these studies offer an overview of several important moments in the development of non-Western scientific thinking and a significant contribution to our understanding of how traditions of technical knowledge were produced and transmitted in the ancient world.
Download or read book Visualizing the invisible with the human body written by J. Cale Johnson and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Physiognomy and ekphrasis are two of the most important modes of description in antiquity and represent the necessary precursors of scientific description. The primary way of divining the characteristics and fate of an individual, whether inborn or acquired, was to observe the patient’s external characteristics and behaviour. This volume focuses initially on two types of descriptive literature in Mesopotamia: physiognomic omens and what we might call ekphrastic description. These modalities are traced through ancient India, Ugaritic and the Hebrew Bible, before arriving at the physiognomic features of famous historical figures such as Themistocles, Socrates or Augustus in the Graeco-Roman world, where physiognomic discussions become intertwined with typological analyses of human characters. The Arabic compendial culture absorbed and remade these different physiognomic and ekphrastic traditions, incorporating both Mesopotamian links between physiognomy and medicine and the interest in characterological ‘types’ that had emerged in the Hellenistic period. This volume offer the first wide-ranging picture of these modalities of description in antiquity.
Download or read book Contemporary Approaches to Mesopotamian Literature written by Dahlia Shehata and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-08-15 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume lays theoretical and methodological groundwork for the analysis of Mesopotamian literature. A comprehensive first chapter by the editors explores critical contemporary issues in Sumerian and Akkadian narrative analysis, and nine case studies written by an international array of scholars test the responsiveness of Sumerian and Akkadian narratives to diverse approaches drawn from literary studies and theories of fiction. Included are intertextual and transtextual analyses, studies of narrative structure and focalization, and treatments of character and characterization. Works considered include the Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic and many other Sumerian and Akkadian narratives of gods, heroes, kings, and monsters.
Download or read book The First Ninety Years written by Lluís Feliu and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-09-11 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is dedicated to Miguel Civil in celebration of his 90th birthday. Civil has been one of the most influential scholars in the field of Sumerian studies over the course of his long career. This anniversary presents a welcome occasion to reflect on some aspects of the field in which he has been such a driving force.
Download or read book Premodern Experience of the Natural World in Translation written by Katja Krause and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-06-29 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative collection showcases the importance of the relationship between translation and experience in premodern science, bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to offer a nuanced understanding of knowledge transfer across premodern time and space. The volume considers experience as a tool and object of science in the premodern world, using this idea as a jumping-off point from which to view translation as a process of interaction between diff erent epistemic domains. The book is structured around four dimensions of translation—between terms within and across languages; across sciences and scientific norms; between verbal and visual systems; and through the expertise of practitioners and translators—which raise key questions on what constituted experience of the natural world in the premodern area and the impact of translation processes and agents in shaping experience. Providing a wide-ranging global account of historical studies on the travel and translation of experience in the premodern world, this book will be of interest to scholars in history, the history of translation, and the history and philosophy of science.
Download or read book The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Wisdom Literature written by Samuel L. Adams and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-02-17 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive introduction to ancient wisdom literature, with fascinating essays on a broad range of topics. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Wisdom Literature is a wide-ranging introduction to the texts, themes, and receptions of the wisdom literature of the Bible and the ancient world. This comprehensive volume brings together original essays from established scholars and emerging voices to offer a variety of perspectives on the “wisdom” biblical books, early Christian and rabbinic literature, and beyond. Varied and engaging essays provide fresh insights on topics of timeless relevance, exploring the distinct features of instructional texts and discussing their interpretation in both antiquity and the modern world. Designed for non-specialists, this accessible volume provides readers with balanced coverage of traditional biblical wisdom texts, including Proverbs, Job, Psalms, and Ecclesiastes; lesser-known Egyptian and Mesopotamian wisdom; and African proverbs. The contributors explore topics ranging from scribes and pedagogy in ancient Israel, to representations of biblical wisdom literature in contemporary cinema. Offering readers a fresh and interesting way to engage with wisdom literature, this book: Discusses sapiential books and traditions in various historical and cultural contexts Offers up-to-date discussion on the study of the biblical wisdom books Features essays on the history of interpretation and theological reception Includes essays covering the antecedents and afterlife of the texts Part of the acclaimed Wiley Blackwell Companions to Religion series, the Companion to Wisdom Literature is a valuable resource for university, seminary and divinity school students and instructors, scholars and researchers, and general readers with interest in the subject.
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 A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages written by Rebecca Hasselbach-Andee and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covers the major languages, language families, and writing systems attested in the Ancient Near East Filled with enlightening chapters by noted experts in the field, this book introduces Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) languages and language families used during the time period of roughly 3200 BCE to the second century CE in the areas of Egypt, the Levant, eastern Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Iran. In addition to providing grammatical sketches of the respective languages, the book focuses on socio-linguistic questions such as language contact, diglossia, the development of literary standard languages, and the development of diplomatic languages or “linguae francae.” It also addresses the interaction of Ancient Near Eastern languages with each other and their roles within the political and cultural systems of ANE societies. Presented in five parts, The Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages provides readers with in-depth chapter coverage of the writing systems of ANE, starting with their decipherment. It looks at the emergence of cuneiform writing; the development of Egyptian writing in the fourth and early third millennium BCI; and the emergence of alphabetic scripts. The book also covers many of the individual languages themselves, including Sumerian, Egyptian, Akkadian, Hittite, Pre- and Post-Exilic Hebrew, Phoenician, Ancient South Arabian, and more. Provides an overview of all major language families and writing systems used in the Ancient Near East during the time period from the beginning of writing (approximately 3200 BCE) to the second century CE (end of cuneiform writing) Addresses how the individual languages interacted with each other and how they functioned in the societies that used them Written by leading experts on the languages and topics The Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages is an ideal book for undergraduate students and scholars interested in Ancient Near Eastern cultures and languages or certain aspects of these languages.
Download or read book Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship written by Glenn W. Most and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a selection of primary sources--in many cases translated into English for the first time--with introductions that provide fascinating historical materials for challenging notions of the ways in which premodern and early modern Eurasian scholars dealt with plurilingualism and monolingualism.
