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Letters from Old Babylonian Kish presents the primary publication of previously unstudied letters from the Old Babylonian Period. Drawing on internal and external evidence, the volume illuminates connections between these letters and other tablets housed in collections in Europe and the USA. The result is the reconstruction of a virtual archive of more than 200 letters from Old Babylonian Kish. Until at least 1600 BC, the compiled archive represents the largest group of related letters from southern Mesopotamia. Although these letters moved into various museums through the antiquities market in the early 1900s, many remained unstudied and unpublished, despite providing many pristine examples of personal and professional correspondence. The study of scribal hands and habits has been aided by the gathering of so many related letters, allowing the identification of four distinct scribal hands. The volume includes an extensive introduction, treating Old Babylonian epistolography and scribal hands.
This book situates discussions of Christian monasticism in Egypt and Palestine within the socio-economic world of the long Late Antiquity, from the golden age of monasticism into and well beyond the Arab conquest (fifth to tenth century). Its thirteen chapters present new research into the rich corpus of textual sources and archaeological remains and move beyond traditional studies that have treated monastic communities as religious entities in physical seclusion from society. The volume brings together scholars working across traditional boundaries of subject and geography and explores a diverse range of topics from the production of food and wine to networks of scribes, patronage, and monastic visitation. As such, it paints a vivid picture of busy monastic lives dependent on and led in tandem with the non-monastic world.
This book explores the relationship between the so-called ventive morpheme in Akkadian (-am) and the related suffixes -n and -a in other Semitic languages, including Amarna Canaanite, Ugaritic, Hebrew, and Arabic. Using formal reconstructions of the various morphemes and a functional analysis of their different usages, Ambjörn Sjörs convincingly argues that these endings are cognate morphemes that were formally and functionally related to the ventive morpheme in Akkadian. Sjörs provides a systematic description of non-allative ventive verbs in Old Babylonian, the energic and volitive in Amarna Canaanite, the energic and lengthened prefix conjugation in Ugaritic, the lengthened imperfect c...
History of the Akkadian Language offers a detailed chronological survey of the oldest known Semitic language and one of history’s longest written records. The outcome is presented in 26 chapters written by 25 leading authors.
Recognizing the absence of a God named Yahweh outside of ancient Israel, this study addresses the related questions of Yahweh's origins and the biblical claim that there were Yahweh-worshipers other than the Israelite people. Beginning with the Hebrew Bible, with an exhaustive survey of ancient Near Eastern literature and inscriptions discovered by archaeology, and using anthropology to reconstruct religious practices and beliefs of ancient Edom and Midian, this study proposes an answer. Yahweh-worshiping Midianites of the Early Iron Age brought their deity along with metallurgy into ancient Palestine and the Israelite people.
Recognizing both the potential of biblical prohibition of images for causing religious conflict and the promise of a more nuanced appreciation of the role of images in human experience, this book constructs a framework for understanding the place of images, and their prohibition, within the biblical text and Christian religious practice.
This book reflects the vibrancy of historical linguistics, showing how research on ancient Indo-European languages contributes to the understanding of the principles and patterns of language organization and change, including studies on typologically natural tendencies and cognitive universals.
This volume presents transcriptions, translations with a full commentary of 23 Ur III incantations from Nippur now held in a collection in Jena. Geller here completes work begun by the late van Dijk in editing the tablets which were composed to combat the work of demons.
This book examines a collection of twenty-two literary letters and related compositions, the Sumerian Epistolary Miscellany, studied as part of the Old Babylonian Sumerian scribal curriculum, in an attempt to better understand the nature of the curriculum as a whole.