Scholars and Scholarship in Late Babylonian Uruk

Scholars and Scholarship in Late Babylonian Uruk
Author: Christine Proust
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2019-01-08
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 303004176X

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This volume explores how scholars wrote, preserved, circulated, and read knowledge in ancient Mesopotamia. It offers an exercise in micro-history that provides a case study for attempting to understand the relationship between scholars and scholarship during this time of great innovation. The papers in this collection focus on tablets written in the city of Uruk in southern Babylonia. These archives come from two different scholarly contexts. One is a private residence inhabited during successive phases by two families of priests who were experts in ritual and medicine. The other is the most important temple in Uruk during the late Achemenid and Hellenistic periods. The contributors undertake detailed studies of this material to explore the scholarly practices of individuals, the connection between different scholarly genres, and the exchange of knowledge between scholars in the city and scholars in other parts of Babylonia and the Greek world. In addition, this collection examines the archives in which the texts were found and the scribes who owned or wrote them. It also considers the interconnections between different genres of knowledge and the range of activities of individual scribes. In doing so, it answers questions of interest not only for the study of Babylonian scholarship but also for the study of ancient Mesopotamian textual culture more generally, and for the study of traditions of written knowledge in the ancient world.

Keeping Watch in Babylon

Keeping Watch in Babylon
Author: Johannes Haubold
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2019-05-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004397760

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This volume offers the first holistic examination of the Astronomical Diaries, a remarkable set of 1000 clay tablets from ancient Babylon in which for over 500 years (6th–1st century BCE) scholars combined astronomical observations with records of events on earth.

Babylonian Ceremonial Script in Its Scholarly Context

Babylonian Ceremonial Script in Its Scholarly Context
Author: Carole Roche-Hawley
Publisher: Lockwood Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2024-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 194848840X

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Since the advent of Assyriology in the early nineteenth century it has been known that two distinct scripts were used in ancient Mesopotamian inscriptions and documents. One, usefully characterized as "cursive," was used for the ephemeral documents of "daily life" as well as on most library and archival texts. The other was a deliberately archaizing script reserved for ceremonial use. This ceremonial script, of Babylonian origin, contained both archaic and archaizing signs, and was in productive use for over two millennia, not only in Babylonia but occasionally also in Assyria and beyond. Yet to date there has been no systematic study devoted specifically to this ceremonial script, nor any published syllabary of the archaic and archaizing signs it employs. This volume attempts to rectify this deficiency by providing a substantive introduction to Babylonian ceremonial script, along with a history of its modern study, and several case studies of how the script was actually used. The introduction is supplemented by an edition of the paleographic lists of the second and first millennia BCE, which contain pedagogical inventories of the archaic and archaizing cuneiform signs, illustrating how the ceremonial script was taught, learned and transmitted in scholarly contexts.

Between Greece and Babylonia

Between Greece and Babylonia
Author: Kathryn Stevens
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2019-05-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108419550

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Focusing on Greece and Babylonia, this book provides a new, cross-cultural approach to the intellectual history of the Hellenistic world.

The Babylonian Astronomical Compendium MUL.APIN

The Babylonian Astronomical Compendium MUL.APIN
Author: Hermann Hunger
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2018-07-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 135168681X

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MUL.APIN, written sometime before the 8th century BC, was the most widely copied astronomical text in ancient Mesopotamia: a compendium including information such as star lists, descriptions of planetary phases, mathematical schemes for the length of day and night, a discussion of the luni-solar calendar and rules for intercalation, and a short collection of celestial omens. This book contains an introductory essay, followed by a new edition of the text and a facing-page transliteration and English translation. Finally, the book contains a new and detailed commentary on the text. This is a fascinating study, and an important resource for anyone interested in the history of astronomy.

The Temporality of Festivals

The Temporality of Festivals
Author: Anke Walter
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 100
Release: 2024-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 3111366871

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How can time become festive? How do festivals manage to make time 'special', to mark out a certain day or days, to distinguish them from 'normal', everyday time, and to fill them with meaning? And how can we reconstruct what festive time looked like in the past and what people thought about it? While a lot of research has been done on festivals from the point of view of several scholarly disciplines, the specific temporality of festivals has not yet attracted sufficient attention. In this volume, scholars from different fields provide answers to the questions raised above, based on a fresh analysis of astronomical documents, calendars, and literary texts. Cultures as diverse as ancient Babylon, Greece and Rome, and medieval China all share a sense of calendrically recurring festive time as something special that needs to be carefully mapped out and preserved, often with great sophistication, and that gives us precious insights into the broader religious, political, and social dimensions of time within past cultures.

Divine Secrets and Human Imaginations

Divine Secrets and Human Imaginations
Author: Angelika Berlejung
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
Total Pages: 695
Release: 2021-04-13
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3161600347

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The articles in this volume of collected essays, written over the last two decades and all revised, updated, and supplemented with unpublished material, are grouped around two themes: Divine Secrets and Human Imaginations. The first essays deal with the production, initiation, use and function, the abduction, repatriation, and the replacement of divine images, their outer appearance, and the many facets of the divine presence theology in Ancient Mesopotamia. The essays on the second topic deal with human imaginations, human constructs, and constructed memories, which assign meaning to the past or to things or experiences that are beyond human control. Thematically, several aspects of the human condition are examined, such as the ideas associated in the Old Testament and the Ancient Near East with death, corporeality, enemies, disasters, utopias, and passionate love.

The Circulation of Astronomical Knowledge in the Ancient World

The Circulation of Astronomical Knowledge in the Ancient World
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 595
Release: 2016-04-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004315632

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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.

Rising Time Schemes in Babylonian Astronomy

Rising Time Schemes in Babylonian Astronomy
Author: John M. Steele
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 115
Release: 2017-03-20
Genre: Science
ISBN: 331955221X

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This revealing work examines an approach from ancient astronomy to what was then a particularly important question, namely that of understanding the relationship between the position in the ecliptic and the time it takes for a fixed-length of the ecliptic beginning at that point to rise above the eastern horizon. Schemes known as “rising time schemes” were used to give lengths of the celestial equator corresponding to each of the twelve zodiacal signs which make up the ecliptic. This book investigates the earliest known examples of these schemes which come from Babylonia and date to the mid to late first millennium BC. Making an important contribution to our knowledge of astronomy in the ancient world, this volume includes editions and translations of all of the known Babylonian rising time texts, including several texts that are identified for the first time. Through a close examination of the preserved texts it has been possible to reconstruct the complete Babylonian rising time scheme. This reconstruction is unprecedented in its completeness, and it is also now possible to situate the scheme within a genre of Babylonian astronomy known as schematic astronomy which presents theoretical descriptions of the astronomical phenomena. The unique discoveries and fresh explorations in this book will be of interest to historians of ancient astronomy, scholars of Babylonian history and those investigating the origins of scientific thought.