Prophets, Lovers and Giraffes

Prophets, Lovers and Giraffes
Author: Orly Goldwasser
Publisher: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2002
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9783447045902

The book's central proposition is that the prominent feature of the hiero-glyphic script which Egyptologists call "determinatives" makes up an elabo-rate system of classifiers. All items of the lexicon take motivated pictorial classifiers. By this device, the script reflects the map of knowledgeorganization of ancient Egyptian culture. The book aims to reveal the principles and constraints governing the codification of the ancient Egyptian universe in this system. There is, to date, no comprehensive study, either in Egyptology or in cognitive linguistics, of the hieroglyphic classifiers as a structured system. The present work attempts to fill the existing hiatus by bridging the disciplines of Egyptology and cognitive studies, using the tools of the latter to elucidate the former and thus perhaps arrive at new perspectives on both. From the Egyptological angle, the book deals with the ancient Egyptians' nomenclature for "items in the world" and the relationship between lexicon and the knowledge organization. However, the events occurring in the picture-script render cognitive processes visible to our inspection hundreds of years before they have ripened into the Egyptian language. This "visibility" bears directly on a number of crucial questions in cognitive linguistics and ethnobiology. The book also includes an introduction to the hieroglyphic script.

Pharaoh's Land and Beyond

Pharaoh's Land and Beyond
Author: Pearce Paul Creasman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2017-06-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0190229098

The concept of pharaonic Egypt as a unified, homogeneous, and isolated cultural entity is misleading. Ancient Egypt was a rich tapestry of social, religious, technological, and economic interconnections among numerous cultures from disparate lands. In fifteen chapters divided into five thematic groups, Pharaoh's Land and Beyond uniquely examines Egypt's relationship with its wider world. The first section details the geographical contexts of interconnections by examining ancient Egyptian exploration, maritime routes, and overland passages. In the next section, chapters address the human principals of association: peoples, with the attendant difficulties of differentiating ethnic identities from the record; diplomatic actors, with their complex balances and presentations of power; and the military, with its evolving role in pharaonic expansion. Natural events, from droughts and floods to illness and epidemics, also played significant roles in this ancient world, as examined in the third section. The final two sections explore the physical manifestations of interconnections between pharaonic Egypt and its neighbors, first in the form of material objects and second, in the powerful exchange of ideas. Whether through diffusion and borrowing of knowledge and technology, through the flow of words by script and literature, or through exchanges in the religious sphere, the pharaonic Egypt that we know today was constantly changing--and changing the cultures around it. This illustrious work represents the first synthesis of these cultural relationships, unbounded by time, geography, or mode.

Archaeology and State Theory

Archaeology and State Theory
Author: Bruce Routledge
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2013-11-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1472504100

After neo-evolutionism, how does one talk about the pre-modern state? Over the past two decades archaeological research has shifted decisively from check-list identifications of the state as an evolutionary type to studies of how power and authority were constituted in specific polities. Developing Gramsci's concept of hegemony, this book provides an accessible discussion of general principles that serve to help us understand and organise these new directions in archaeological research. Throughout this book, conceptual issues are illustrated by means of case studies drawn from Madagascar, Mesopotamia, the Inca, the Maya and Greece.

Perception Metaphors

Perception Metaphors
Author: Laura J. Speed
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2019-02-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027263043

Metaphor allows us to think and talk about one thing in terms of another, ratcheting up our cognitive and expressive capacity. It gives us concrete terms for abstract phenomena, for example, ideas become things we can grasp or let go of. Perceptual experience—characterised as physical and relatively concrete—should be an ideal source domain in metaphor, and a less likely target. But is this the case across diverse languages? And are some sensory modalities perhaps more concrete than others? This volume presents critical new data on perception metaphors from over 40 languages, including many which are under-studied. Aside from the wealth of data from diverse languages—modern and historical; spoken and signed—a variety of methods (e.g., natural language corpora, experimental) and theoretical approaches are brought together. This collection highlights how perception metaphor can offer both a bedrock of common experience and a source of continuing innovation in human communication.

The Oxford Handbook of Egyptian Epigraphy and Palaeography

The Oxford Handbook of Egyptian Epigraphy and Palaeography
Author: Vanessa Davies
Publisher:
Total Pages: 721
Release: 2020
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0190604654

Unites the disciplines of epigraphy and palaeography to describe the challenges and solutions in making and deciphering ancient text and art, Features valuable perspectives from an international team of experts, Discusses current theories with regard to the cultural setting and material realities of Egyptian remains, Clearly presents traditional and emerging techniques and challenges as a guide for future research Book jacket.

Variability in the Earlier Egyptian Mortuary Texts

Variability in the Earlier Egyptian Mortuary Texts
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 525
Release: 2023-10-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004677984

This book spins around the convening idea of variability to offer fourteen new views into the Pyramid and Coffin Texts and related materials that overarch archaeology, philology, linguistics, writing studies, religious studies and social history by applying innovative approaches such as agency, politeness, material philology and object-based studies, and under a strong empirical focus. In this book, you will find from a previously unpublished coffin or a reinterpretation of the so-called ‘Letters to the Dead’ to graffiti’s interaction with monumental inscriptions, ‘subatomic’ studies in the spellings of the Osiris’ name or the puzzles of text transmission, among other novel topics.

Drawing Attention to Metaphor

Drawing Attention to Metaphor
Author: Camilla Di Biase-Dyson
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2020-04-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027261490

The communicative act of drawing attention to metaphor is a relatively recent topic in metaphor studies and one that has remained contentious from a cognitive perspective. This book brings philologists of ancient languages together with metaphor experts from several modalities to interrogate whether ancient and modern texts and languages draw attention to figurative tropes in similar ways. In this way, the diachronic, multimodal and pluridisciplinary contributions to this volume critically review the theoretical frameworks underpinning metaphor marking and metaphor analysis from a completely new empirical basis.

The Routledge Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East

The Routledge Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East
Author: Kiersten Neumann
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 1034
Release: 2021-09-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000436470

This Handbook is a state-of-the-field volume containing diverse approaches to sensory experience, bringing to life in an innovative, remarkably vivid, and visceral way the lives of past humans through contributions that cover the chronological and geographical expanse of the ancient Near East. It comprises thirty-two chapters written by leading international contributors that look at the ways in which humans, through their senses, experienced their lives and the world around them in the ancient Near East, with coverage of Anatolia, Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Persia, from the Neolithic through the Roman period. It is organised into six parts related to sensory contexts: Practice, production, and taskscape; Dress and the body; Ritualised practice and ceremonial spaces; Death and burial; Science, medicine, and aesthetics; and Languages and semantic fields. In addition to exploring what makes each sensory context unique, this organisation facilitates cross-cultural and cross-chronological, as well as cross-sensory and multisensory comparisons and discussions of sensory experiences in the ancient world. In so doing, the volume also enables considerations of senses beyond the five-sense model of Western philosophy (sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell), including proprioception and interoception, and the phenomena of synaesthesia and kinaesthesia. The Routledge Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East provides scholars and students within the field of ancient Near Eastern studies new perspectives on and conceptions of familiar spaces, places, and practices, as well as material culture and texts. It also allows scholars and students from adjacent fields such as Classics and Biblical Studies to engage with this material, and is a must-read for any scholar or student interested in or already engaged with the field of sensory studies in any period.

Egyptian Things

Egyptian Things
Author: Edward William Kelting
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2024-11-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520402197

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. After the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, Rome finally took control of Egypt. This occupation simultaneously facilitated and circumscribed the exchange of goods, people, and ideas along the paths carved across Rome’s burgeoning empire. In this book, Edward Kelting sets out to recapture one of these systems of exchange: the vibrant literary tradition known as Aegyptiaca—or “Egyptian things”—in which culturally mixed authors wrote about Egypt for a Greek and Roman audience. These authors have been dismissed as not really “Egyptian,” and their contemporary popularity has been ignored. But as Kelting powerfully argues, this genre in fact constitutes a vibrant intellectual tradition, developed from heterogeneous influences but deeply engaged with Egypt’s pharaonic past. In contrast to usual narratives of Roman domination, Kelting uncovers a complex project of political engagement and cultural translation in which Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all participated.

Egypt 2015: Perspectives of Research

Egypt 2015: Perspectives of Research
Author: Mladen Tomorad
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2017-04-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1784915858

This volume presents proceedings from the Seventh European Conference of Egyptologists, Zagreb, Croatia 2015.