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Women and Religion in the Ancient Near East and Asia
The recent years have seen an upswing in studies of women in the ancient Near East and related areas. This volume, which is the result of a Danish-Japanese collaboration, seeks to highlight women as actors within the sphere of the religious. In ancient Mesopotamia and other ancient civilizations, religious beliefs and practices permeated all aspects of society, and for this reason it is not possible to completely dissociate religion from politics, economy, or literature. Thus, the goal is to shift the perspective by highlighting the different ways in which the agency of women can be traced in the historical (and archaeological) record. This perspectival shift can be seen in studies of elite women, who actively contributed to (religious) gift-giving or participated in temple economies, or through showing the limits of elite women’s agency in relation to diplomatic marriages. Additionally, several contributions examine the roles of women as religious officials and the language, worship, or invocation of goddesses. This volume does not aim at completeness but seeks to highlight points for further research and new perspectives.
Women and Religion in the Ancient Near East and Asia
The recent years have seen an upswing in studies of women in the ancient Near East and related areas. This volume, which is the result of a Danish-Japanese collaboration, seeks to highlight women as actors within the sphere of the religious. In ancient Mesopotamia and other ancient civilizations, religious beliefs and practices permeated all aspects of society, and for this reason it is not possible to completely dissociate religion from politics, economy, or literature. Thus, the goal is to shift the perspective by highlighting the different ways in which the agency of women can be traced in the historical (and archaeological) record. This perspectival shift can be seen in studies of elite women, who actively contributed to (religious) gift-giving or participated in temple economies, or through showing the limits of elite women’s agency in relation to diplomatic marriages. Additionally, several contributions examine the roles of women as religious officials and the language, worship, or invocation of goddesses. This volume does not aim at completeness but seeks to highlight points for further research and new perspectives.
Consumption, Status, and Sustainability
Focuses information from across time and culture on the relationships among status competition, consumption, and planetary sustainability.
The World's Oldest Literature
Literature begins at Sumer, we may say. Given that this ancient crossroads of tin and copper produced not only bronze and the entire Bronze Age, but also by neccesity, the first system of record-keeping and the technique of writing. Scribal schools served to propogate the new technique and their curriculum grew to create, preserve and transmit all manner of creative poetry. In a lifetime of research, the author has studied multiple aspects of this most ancient literary oeuvre, including such questions as chronology and bilingualism, as well as contributing fundamental insights into specific genres such as proverbs, letter-prayers and lamentations. In addition, he has drawn conclusions for the comparative or contextual approach to biblical literature. His studies, widely scattered in diverse publications for nearly fifty years, are here assembled in convenient one-volume format, made more user-friendly by extensive cross-references and indices.
Letters from Old Babylonian Kish
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.
Visualizing Knowledge and Creating Meaning in Ancient Writing Systems
Ancient writing systems employ logographic and logophonetic principles playing on the relationship between writing, script and scribal learning. The workshop proceedings published in this volume explore the way these relationships encode knowledge and meaning reflected in the social, historical and cultural mentality of the early peoples of East Asia (China and Japan), Anatolia, the Aegean, Egypt and Mesoamerica. The meeting was organized in the FU Berlin on the fall of 2010 by the editor and Dr. Renata Landgrafova (now Charles University, Prague) in the frame of the DFG research training group 1458 "Notational Iconicity" ("Schriftbildlichkeit") headed by Prof. Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum and Prof...
Religion and Power
This volume represents a collection of contributions presented during the Third Annual University of Chicago Oriental Institute Seminar Religion and Power: Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond, held at the Oriental Institute, February 23-24, 2007. The purpose of this conference was to examine more closely concepts of kingship in various regions of the world and in different time periods. The study of kingship goes back to the roots of fields such as anthropology and religious studies, as well as Assyriology and Near Eastern archaeology. More recently, several conferences have been held on kingship, drawing on cross-cultural comparisons. Yet the question of the divinity of the king...
The Primeval Flood Catastrophe
Previous research on Mesopotamian Flood traditions tended to focus on a few textual sources. How the traditions originated and developed as a whole has not been seriously investigated. By systematically examining a large body of relevant cuneiform sources of diverse genres from the Early Dynastic III period (ca. 2600-2350 B.C.) to the end of the first millennium B.C., this book observes that it is during the Old Babylonian period (ca. 2000-1600) and classical attestations of the Flood traditions are found. On linguistic, conceptual and literary-historical grounds, the book argues that the Flood traditions emerged relatively late in Sumerian traditions. It traces different evolutionary stages...
The Cow in the Elevator
In The Cow in the Elevator Tulasi Srinivas explores a wonderful world where deities jump fences and priests ride in helicopters to present a joyful, imaginative, yet critical reading of modern religious life. Drawing on nearly two decades of fieldwork with priests, residents, and devotees, and her own experience of living in the high-tech city of Bangalore, Srinivas finds moments where ritual enmeshes with global modernity to create wonder—a feeling of amazement at being overcome by the unexpected and sublime. Offering a nuanced account of how the ruptures of modernity can be made normal, enrapturing, and even comical in a city swept up in globalization's tumult, Srinivas brings the visceral richness of wonder—apparent in creative ritual in and around Hindu temples—into the anthropological gaze. Broaching provocative philosophical themes like desire, complicity, loss, time, money, technology, and the imagination, Srinivas pursues an interrogation of wonder and the adventure of writing true to its experience. The Cow in the Elevator rethinks the study of ritual while reshaping our appreciation of wonder's transformative potential for scholarship and for life.
Civilizations of Ancient Iraq
In Civilizations of Ancient Iraq, Benjamin and Karen Foster tell the fascinating story of ancient Mesopotamia from the earliest settlements ten thousand years ago to the Arab conquest in the seventh century. Accessible and concise, this is the most up-to-date and authoritative book on the subject. With illustrations of important works of art and architecture in every chapter, the narrative traces the rise and fall of successive civilizations and peoples in Iraq over the course of millennia--from the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians to the Persians, Seleucids, Parthians, and Sassanians. Ancient Iraq was home to remarkable achievements. One of the birthplaces of civilization, it saw the w...
