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This volume contains eleven articles, demonstrating the broad variety of scholarly approaches to the study of Sumerian literature. It is dedicated to H.L.J. Vanstiphout at the occasion of his retirement from the University of Groningen, July 14th 2006.
Since its founding by Jacques Waardenburg in 1971, Religion and Reason has been a leading forum for contributions on theories, theoretical issues and agendas related to the phenomenon and the study of religion. Topics include (among others) category formation, comparison, ethnophilosophy, hermeneutics, methodology, myth, phenomenology, philosophy of science, scientific atheism, structuralism, and theories of religion. From time to time the series publishes volumes that map the state of the art and the history of the discipline.
The Babylonian Disputation Poems studies a group of ancient Babylonian poems featuring discussions between animals and trees. It contains editions of several new texts as well as an assessment of the genre and its impact on later traditions of literary disputations.
In this book the author attempts to unravel the original narratives which underlie the biblical Book of Esther. She reconstructs the contents of three non-Jewish narratives: A wedding story, in which the foreign beauty (Esther) takes the place of the disobedient queen, and two court narratives, telling the story of the rivalry between two courtiers at the Persian court. In exilic and postexilic times these basic narratives were merged into one topical and literarily well developed narrative, which expressed the problems connected with Jewish life in the diaspora. The author shows that this text has been redactionally revised once more, in an attempt to adjust Palestinian Judaism to the Jewish communities that flourished in the diaspora. This redaction bears the hallmarks of Judaism’s clash with Hellenised political forces; Purim emerges as a succesful defense.
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.
Ishtar is the first book dedicated to providing an accessible analysis of the mythology and image of this complex goddess. The polarity of her nature is reflected in her role as goddess of sexual love and war, and has made her difficult to characterise in modern scholarship. By exploring this complexity, Ishtar offers insight into Mesopotamian culture and thought, and elucidates a goddess who transcended the limits of gender, divinity and nature. It gives an accessible introduction to the Near Eastern pantheon, while also opening a pathway for comparison with the later Near Eastern and Mediterranean deities who followed her.
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.
Many of the world's first written records have been found in the area of the Ancient Near East, in what is today known as the Middle East. While many people are familiar with the ancient Israelite literature recorded in the Hebrew Bible, most Near Eastern literature remains a mystery. From an Antique Land lifts the veil from these fascinating writings, explaining the ancient stories in the context of their cultures. From the invention of writing through the conquest of Alexander the Great, expert scholars examine literature originally written in Egyptian, Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, Ugaritic, Canaanite, Hebrew, and Aramaic. Each chapter includes an overview of the culture, a discussion of literary genres, and descriptions and short analyses of the major literary works. Photos of archaeological remains further illustrate these people and their writings.
Providing a scholar's salute to a teacher, colleague, and friend, the contributors of this new volume honor the memory of Thorkild Jacobsen with essays on Mesopotamian history, culture, literature, and religion. Contributors include: Tzvi Abusch, John Huehnergard, Bendt Alster, Jeremy Black, Miguel Civil, Jerrold S. Cooper, M. J. Geller, Stephen A. Geller, Samuel Greengus, William W. Hallo, Wolfgang Heimpel, Jacob Klein, W. G. Lambert, Jack M. Sasson, Ake W. Sjoberg, Piotr Steinkeller, H. L. J. Vanstiphout, and Claus Wilcke.
This volume contains ten chapters on Persian metaphors, tropes, rhetorical figures, and poetic forms and genres, by some of the world's foremost scholars in the field of classical Persian poetry.