Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!

You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.

Sign up

Gastrointestinal Disease and Its Treatment in Ancient Mesopotamia
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 288

Gastrointestinal Disease and Its Treatment in Ancient Mesopotamia

Babylonian medicine is the most important corpus of ancient medicine prior to the Greeks. This volume provides a comprehensive picture of how gasrtrointestinal illness, jaundice and related fevers, as well as diarrhea were treated in ancient Mesopotamia. The editions include transliterations, straightforward translations and essential commentary, and are divided into three main sections: the standard corpus for the treatment of gastrointestinal illness in Royal Library in Nineveh (otherwise known as the sualu subcorpus), the related group of texts that attribute intestinal disturbances to malevolent ghosts and a third group of texts focused on diarrhea. In addition to the standard compendia, isolated precursor texts, which were incorporated into these compendia, are included here in appendices. This volume provides an overarching picture of the entire field of gastrointestinal illnesses and related conditions in ancient Mesopotamia.

Visualizing the invisible with the human body
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 486

Visualizing the invisible with the human body

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.

dnin-ḫur-saĝ: The Treasure of Mankind
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 354

dnin-ḫur-saĝ: The Treasure of Mankind

  • Type: Book
  • -
  • Published: 2023-04-26
  • -
  • Publisher: Yuri Aldanov

This book attempts to re-think the purpose of the Great Pyramid of the Giza Plateau which are commonly thought to be the tombs of Pharaohs. The first part examines the Great Pyramid’s architectural features, construction details, and internal structure, referencing experts and historical figures such as Professor WM Flinders Petrie, Colonel Howard Vyse, Piazzi Smyth, Herodotus, Irving Finkel, brothers John and Morton Edgar, Jimmy Dunn, Giovanni Battista Caviglia, Giovanni Battista Belzoni, and many others. This portion of the book closely examines peculiarities of the internal floorplan of the Great Pyramid and signs of destruction found in its internal rooms and passageways. In the second...

Mesopotamian Commentaries on the Diagnostic Handbook Sa-gig
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 513

Mesopotamian Commentaries on the Diagnostic Handbook Sa-gig

  • Type: Book
  • -
  • Published: 2019-12-16
  • -
  • Publisher: BRILL

Mesopotamian Commentaries on the Diagnostic Handbook Sa-gig includes a cuneiform edition, English translation, and notes on medical lexicography for thirty Sa-gig commentary tablets and fragments, and represents a companion volume to Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary (Brill, 2019).

Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 533

Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary

  • Type: Book
  • -
  • Published: 2019-12-09
  • -
  • Publisher: BRILL

Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary explores the dynamic between scholastic rhetoric and medical knowledge in ancient commentaries on a Mesopotamian Diagnostic Handbook, whose atypical language and ideas were harmonized with conventional ways of perceiving and describing the sick body.

Legitimising Magic
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 223

Legitimising Magic

  • Type: Book
  • -
  • Published: 2023-12-11
  • -
  • Publisher: BRILL

As magic is a powerful means to influence the natural world and human beings, and is deeply connected to the divine sphere, persons using it are in constant need to justify its use. The ambivalence of magic to serve both well-wishing and ill-wishing aims puts the practitioners ever at risk. This volume illuminates the strategies adopted to legitimise the practice of magic and analyses how these justifications are phrased and formulated in cuneiform texts, thereby revealing the underlying principles and unexplained axioms of using magic in the Ancient Near East.

Identifying the Stones of Classical Hebrew
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 251

Identifying the Stones of Classical Hebrew

  • Type: Book
  • -
  • Published: 2024-08-26
  • -
  • Publisher: BRILL

Since the translation of the Septuagint in the 3rd century BCE, scholars have attempted to identify the stones that populate the biblical text. This study rejects the long-standing reliance on ancient translations for identifying biblical stones. Despite the evident contradictions and historical inconsistencies, scholars traditionally presumed these translations to be reliable. By departing from this approach, this volume presents a novel synthesis of comparative linguistics and archeogemological data. Through rigorous analysis of valid cognates, it establishes correlations between Hebrew stone names and their counterparts in ancient languages, corresponding to known mineral species. This methodological shift enables a more accurate identification of stones mentioned in biblical texts, thus recovering their true historical context. The research not only advances our understanding of biblical mineralogy but also provides a fresh perspective on the material culture of the Ancient Levant, offering valuable insights for scholars and laymen, linguists and archaeologists alike.

Painting in Stone
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 449

Painting in Stone

A sweeping history of premodern architecture told through the material of stone Spanning almost five millennia, Painting in Stone tells a new history of premodern architecture through the material of precious stone. Lavishly illustrated examples include the synthetic gems used to simulate Sumerian and Egyptian heavens; the marble temples and mansions of Greece and Rome; the painted palaces and polychrome marble chapels of early modern Italy; and the multimedia revival in 19th-century England. Poetry, the lens for understanding costly marbles as an artistic medium, summoned a spectrum of imaginative associations and responses, from princes and patriarchs to the populace. Three salient themes sustained this “lithic imagination”: marbles as images of their own elemental substance according to premodern concepts of matter and geology; the perceived indwelling of astral light in earthly stones; and the enduring belief that colored marbles exhibited a form of natural—or divine—painting, thanks to their vivacious veining, rainbow palette, and chance images.

Assyrian and Babylonian Scholarly Text Catalogues
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 692

Assyrian and Babylonian Scholarly Text Catalogues

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.

A Cultural History of Chemistry
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 313

A Cultural History of Chemistry

The volume set of the Cultural History of Chemistry presents the first comprehensive history from the Bronze Age to today, covering all forms and aspects of chemistry and its ever-changing social context. The themes covered in each volume and theory and concepts ; practice and experiment ; laboratories and technology ; culture and science ; society and enviroment ; trade and industry ; learning and institutions ; art and representation.