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The second half of the proceedings, City Administration in the Ancient Near East, is available here. A workshop volume is available here. In July 2007, the 53rd Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale (the annual meeting of the International Association of Assyriologists) was held in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia. In Moscow, several hundred Assyriologists enjoyed the hospitality of the Russian State University for the Humanities. Dozens of papers on the topic “Language in the Ancient Near East,” were delivered at the University. More than 50 of those papers are published in this 2-volume set.
A Glossary of Old Syrian: l–z is the second of two volumes that aim to map the lexicon of Old Syrian as it can be extracted and reconstructed from the (Old Akkadian) Eblaite through the Old and Middle Babylonian corpora. Referring to a continuum of dialects spoken in the Syrian-Levantine and Syrian-Mesopotamian regions through the third and second millennia BCE, “Old Syrian” is a diachronically conservative, geographically pluricentric, and pragmatically multilayered linguistic cluster. As such, the Glossary pays special attention to the distribution of lexical data along diachronic, diatopic, and diastratic criteria. Given the extent and widely dispersed nature of this data, entries are supported by the most representative corpora of the Old Syrian linguistic landscape. Each entry is headed by an etymon, a kind of prelinguistic consonantal skeleton, and further information about different lexemes, their roots, and their derivations is provided in subentries. As the lexicography of Old Syrian remains uncertain, the Glossary includes leading interpretative opinions alongside the most relevant Semitic material to corroborate the lexical choices it adopts. Bibliographical references are succinct and restricted, as a rule, to texts easily found in any Assyriological or Semitic library. Intended as a reference work in support of future study, A Glossary of Old Syrian offers a clear view of the state of the field.
The Age of Agade is the first book-length study of the Akkadian period of Mesopotamian history, which saw the rise and fall of the world’s first empire during more than a century of extraordinary political, social, and cultural innovation. It draws together more than 40 years of research by one of the world’s leading experts in Assyriology to offer an exhaustive survey of the Akkadian empire. Addressing all aspects of the empire, including its statecraft and military, territory and cities, arts, religion, economy, and production, The Age of Agade considers what can be said of Akkadian political and social history, material culture, and daily life. A final chapter also explores how the empire has been presented in modern historiography, from the decipherment of cuneiform to the present, including the extensive research of Soviet historians, summarized here in English for the first time. Drawing on contemporaneous written and artifactual sources, as well as relevant materials from succeeding generations, Foster introduces the reader to the wealth of evidence available. Accessibly written by a specialist in the field, this book is an engaging examination of a critical era in the history of early Mesopotamia.
In July, 2011, the International Association for Assyriology met in Rome, Italy, for 5 days to deliver and listen to papers on the theme “Tradition and Innovation in the Ancient Near East”. This volume, the proceedings of the conference, contains more than 40 of the papers read at the 57th annual Rencontre, including 3 plenary lectures/papers, many papers directly connected with the theme, as well as a workshop on parents and children. The papers covered every period of Mesopotamian history, from the third millennium through the end of the first millennium B.C.E. The attendees were warmly hosted by faculty and students from the Università di Roma “La Sapienza”.
Being the first monographic study of this kind in the field of Assyriology, this book comprises an investigation of Ancient Mesopotamian concepts of the human person. Concentrating on Akkadian cuneiform texts from the 2nd and 1st millennium BC, the author examines the characteristics and attributes attached to human beings and the notions of the person as a composite being through a semantic analysis of Akkadian terms for the body, body parts and aspects of the self, which can be termed "souls". Through an examination of a wide range of textual sources and an interdisciplinary approach, this study shows that the Mesopotamian views of personhood share amazing similarities with those of the neighbouring ancient cultures, but often differ from our own. “...in short, as a piece of modern Assyriological scholarship it is very well done and a tribute to its author’s capabilities and accomplishments.” Benjamin R. Foster, Yale University
Many scholars today believe that early Greek literature, as represented by the great poems of Homer and Hesiod, was to some extent inspired by texts from the neighbouring civilizations of the ancient Near East, especially Mesopotamia. It is true that, in the case of religious poetry, early Greek poets sang about their gods in ways that resemble those of Sumerian or Akkadian hymns from Mesopotamia, but does this mean that the latter influenced the former, and if so, how? This volume is the first to attempt an answer to these questions by undertaking a detailed study of the ancient texts in their original languages, from Sumerian poetry in the 20th century BC to Greek sources from the times of Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and Aeschylus. The Gods Rich in Praise presents the core groups of sources from the ancient Near East, describing the main features of style and content of Sumerian and Akkadian religious poetry, and showing how certain compositions were translated and adapted beyond Mesopotamia. It proceeds by comparing selected elements of form and content: hymnic openings, negative predication, the birth of Aphrodite in the Theogony of Hesiod, and the origins and development of a phrase in Hittite prayers and the Iliad of Homer. The volume concludes that, in terms of form and style, early Greek religious poetry was probably not indebted to ancient Near Eastern models, but also argues that such influence may nevertheless be perceived in certain closely defined instances, particularly where supplementary evidence from other ancient sources is available, and where the extant sources permit a reconstruction of the process of translation and adaptation.
Traditionally, writing--a graphic, multidimensional form of communication--has been approached as a vehicle for representing, and therefore conveying, the spoken word. Moving beyond this manner of analysis, this volume interrogates writing as a medium that is not simply a handmaiden to oral and aural exchange but a communication system that is richly layered and experienced. To exploit this aspect of visual code, scholars from the fields of Egyptology, Sinology, Hittitology, and Assyriology, together with Mesoamericanists, art historians, and a sign language specialist, are brought together in this volume. In its pages, these contributors incorporate into their analyses methods more commonly used in linguistics and semiotics, communication studies, art historical analysis, and traditional philology to new ends in order to form original trajectories of inquiry. Each contribution either lays bare explicit exploitation of visuality in scribal production as a means to cement power, reveal the mystical, induce humor, or expose clandestine views or it locates implicit knowledge schemes and cultural maps underlying and informing these same productions. The pioneering investigations presented in Seen Not Heard reveal that although writing may be heard, the fact that it can also be seen affects its reception and therefore the meaning of any transported phonological units.
Legal texts recording the purchase or exchange of entire settlements are among the most important cuneiform tablets discovered at Old Babylonian/Middle Bronze Age (Level VII) Alalah. Following the Man of Yamhad is the first book-length study of these legal texts and the socio-economic practice that they document. The author explores the nature of the alienated settlements, the rights enjoyed by their owners, the underlying system of land tenure, and the larger political context in which the transactions occurred. The study is supported by extensive collations and up-to-date editions of relevant legal and administrative texts. Its conclusions will be of interest to anyone working on the history, society, and economy of the Bronze Age Near East.
The book deals with the concept of fragmentation as applied to languages and their documentation. It focuses in particular on the theoretical and methodological consequences of such a fragmentation for the linguistic analysis and interpretation of texts and, hence, for the reconstruction of languages. Furthermore, by adopting an innovative perspective, the book aims to test the application of the concept of fragmentation to languages which are not commonly included in the categories of ‘Corpussprache’, ‘Trümmersprache’, and ‘Restsprache’. This is the case with diachronic or diatopic varieties — of even well-known languages — which are only attested through a limited corpus of texts as well as with endangered languages. In this latter case, not only is the documentation fragmented, but the very linguistic competence of the speakers, due to the reduction of contexts of language use, interference phenomena with majority languages, and consequent presence of semi-speakers.
This volume presents first editions of a variety of cuneiform tablets from the Old Babylonian period belonging to the collection of the late Shlomo Moussaieff. It makes available for the first time three texts representing varying levels of Mesopotamian scribal education. The first is what the authors argue is the most complete copy of the first fifty lines of the standard version of the Sumerian epic Gilgameš and the Bull of Heaven. The second is a hitherto unpublished bilingual (Sumerian-Akkadian) lexical list of unknown provenance, similar to the Proto-Aa syllabary. Each of the 314 entries preserved on this tablet provides a pronunciation gloss, a Sumerian logogram, and an Akkadian translation. A unique feature of this list is that the signs are arranged on the basis of graphic concatenation: each sign contains one of the graphic components of the preceding sign. It also yields a great number of hitherto unknown, synonymous Akkadian translations to the Sumerian logograms. The final chapter contains an edition of two groups of lenticular school tablets, containing thirty-three elementary-level scribal exercises. With this volume, Jacob Klein and Yitschak Sefati preserve and disseminate important artifacts that advance the study of Sumerian literature, Mesopotamian lexicography, and ancient Near Eastern scribal education.