Bodies of Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia

Bodies of Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia
Author: Matthew Rutz
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 704
Release: 2013-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004245685

In Bodies of Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia Matthew Rutz explores the relationship between ancient collections of texts, commonly deemed libraries and archives, and the modern interpretation of titles like ‘diviner’. By looking at cuneiform tablets as artifacts with archaeological contexts, this work probes the modern analytical categories used to study ancient diviners and investigates the transmission of Babylonian/Assyrian scholarship in Syria. During the Late Bronze Age diviners acted as high-ranking scribes and cultic functionaries in Emar, a town on the Syrian Euphrates (ca. 1375-1175 BCE). This book’s centerpiece is an extensive analytical catalogue of the excavated tablet collection of one family of diviners. Over seventy-five fragments are identified for the first time, along with many proposed joins between fragments.

Ancient Knowledge Networks

Ancient Knowledge Networks
Author: Eleanor Robson
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2019-11-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1787355942

Ancient Knowledge Networks is a book about how knowledge travels, in minds and bodies as well as in writings. It explores the forms knowledge takes and the meanings it accrues, and how these meanings are shaped by the peoples who use it.Addressing the relationships between political power, family ties, religious commitments and literate scholarship in the ancient Middle East of the first millennium BC, Eleanor Robson focuses on two regions where cuneiform script was the predominant writing medium: Assyria in the north of modern-day Syria and Iraq, and Babylonia to the south of modern-day Baghdad. She investigates how networks of knowledge enabled cuneiform intellectual culture to endure and adapt over the course of five world empires until its eventual demise in the mid-first century BC. In doing so, she also studies Assyriological and historical method, both now and over the past two centuries, asking how the field has shaped and been shaped by the academic concerns and fashions of the day. Above all, Ancient Knowledge Networks is an experiment in writing about ‘Mesopotamian science’, as it has often been known, using geographical and social approaches to bring new insights into the intellectual history of the world’s first empires.

Ancient Mesopotamia

Ancient Mesopotamia
Author: A. Leo Oppenheim
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 494
Release: 2013-01-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 022617767X

"This splendid work of scholarship . . . sums up with economy and power all that the written record so far deciphered has to tell about the ancient and complementary civilizations of Babylon and Assyria."—Edward B. Garside, New York Times Book Review Ancient Mesopotamia—the area now called Iraq—has received less attention than ancient Egypt and other long-extinct and more spectacular civilizations. But numerous small clay tablets buried in the desert soil for thousands of years make it possible for us to know more about the people of ancient Mesopotamia than any other land in the early Near East. Professor Oppenheim, who studied these tablets for more than thirty years, used his intimate knowledge of long-dead languages to put together a distinctively personal picture of the Mesopotamians of some three thousand years ago. Following Oppenheim's death, Erica Reiner used the author's outline to complete the revisions he had begun. "To any serious student of Mesopotamian civilization, this is one of the most valuable books ever written."—Leonard Cottrell, Book Week "Leo Oppenheim has made a bold, brave, pioneering attempt to present a synthesis of the vast mass of philological and archaeological data that have accumulated over the past hundred years in the field of Assyriological research."—Samuel Noah Kramer, Archaeology A. Leo Oppenheim, one of the most distinguished Assyriologists of our time, was editor in charge of the Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute and John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Chicago.

Archaeology and Apprenticeship

Archaeology and Apprenticeship
Author: Willeke Wendrich
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2013-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816599300

Archaeologists study a wide array of material remains to propose conclusions about non-material aspects of culture. The intricacies of these findings have increased over recent decades, but only limited attention has been paid to what the archaeological record can tell us about the transfer of cultural knowledge through apprenticeship. Apprenticeship is broadly defined as the transmission of culture through a formal or informal teacher–pupil relationship. This collection invites a wide discussion, citing case studies from all over the world and yet focuses the scholarship into a concise set of contributions. The chapters in this volume demonstrate how archaeology can benefit greatly from the understanding of the social dimensions of knowledge transfer. This book also examines apprenticeship in archaeology against a backdrop of sociological and cognitive psychology literature, to enrich the understanding of the relationship between material remains and enculturation. Each of the authors in this collection looks specifically at how material remains can reveal several specific aspects of ancient cultures: What is the human potential for learning? How do people learn? Who is teaching? Why are they learning? What are the results of such learning? How do we recognize knowledge transfer in the archaeological record? These fundamental questions are featured in various forms in all chapters of the book. With case studies from the American Southwest, Alaska, Egypt, Ancient Greece, and Mesopotamia, this book will have broad appeal for scholars—particularly those concerned with cultural transmission and traditions of learning and education—all over the world.

Women's Writing of Ancient Mesopotamia

Women's Writing of Ancient Mesopotamia
Author: Charles Halton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 110705205X

This anthology translates and discusses texts authored by women of ancient Mesopotamia.

The Comparable Body - Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman Medicine

The Comparable Body - Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman Medicine
Author: John Z Wee
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2017-11-13
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9004356770

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. Topics address the role of analogy and metaphor as features of medical culture and theory, while questioning their naturalness and inevitability, their limits, their situation between the descriptive and the prescriptive, and complexities in their portrayal as a mutually intelligible medium for communication and consensus among users.

Mesopotamian Civilization

Mesopotamian Civilization
Author: Daniel T. Potts
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 404
Release: 1997-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780485930016

Likely to become a standard work for students of the ancient Near East, and for those interested in the high cultures of the region, this account is also a highly accessible repository of information valuable to archaeologists, anthropologists, etc

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

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.

The Expression of Emotions in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia

The Expression of Emotions in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia
Author: Shih-Wei Hsu
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 535
Release: 2020-11-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004430768

The Expression of Emotions in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia offers an overview of the study of emotions in ancient texts and discusses the concept of emotions in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia

Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia
Author: Jean Bottéro
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2001-09-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780801868641

Described by the editor as unpretentious roamings on the odd little byways of the history of ancient Mesopotamia, these 15 articles were originally published in the French journal L'Histoire and are designed to serve as an introductory sampling of the historical research on the lost civilization. Chapters explore cuisine, sexuality, women's rights, architecture, magic and medicine, myth, legend, and other aspects of Mesopotamian life. Originally published as Initiation a l'Orient ancien . Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR