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This book investigates the issue of the singularity versus the multiplicity of ancient Near Eastern deities who are known by a common first name but differentiated by their last names, or geographic epithets. It focuses primarily on the Ištar divine names in Mesopotamia, Baal names in the Levant, and Yahweh names in Israel, and it is structured around four key questions: How did the ancients define what it meant to be a god - or more pragmatically, what kind of treatment did a personality or object need to receive in order to be considered a god by the ancients? Upon what bases and according to which texts do modern scholars determine when a personality or object is a god in an ancient culture? In what ways are deities with both first and last names treated the same and differently from deities with only first names? Under what circumstances are deities with common first names and different last names recognizable as distinct independent deities, and under what circumstances are they merely local manifestations of an overarching deity? The conclusions drawn about the singularity of local manifestations versus the multiplicity of independent deities are specific to each individual first name examined in accordance with the data and texts available for each divine first name.
The Late Assyrian Empire (c. 900 - 612 BCE) was the first state to rule over the major centres of the Middle East, and the Late Assyrian court inhabited some of the most monumental palaces of its time. The Architecture of Late Assyrian Royal Palaces is the first volume to provide an in-depth analysis of Late Assyrian palatial architecture, offering a general introduction to all key royal palaces in the major centres of the empire: Assur, Kalḫu, Dur-Sharruken, and Nineveh. Where previous research has often focused on the duality between public and private realms, this volume redefines the cultural principles governing these palaces and proposes a new historical framework, analysing the spatial organization of the palace community which placed the king front and centre. It brings together the architecture of such palaces as currently understood within the broader framework of textual and art-historical sources, and argues that architectural changes were guided by a need to accommodate ever larger groups as the empire grew in size.
This book explores the representation of Persian monarchy and the court of the Achaemenid Great Kings from the point of view of the ancient Iranians themselves and through the sometimes distorted prism of Classical authors.
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.
Many Jewish groups of late antiquity assumed that they were obligated to observe the Divine Law. This book attempts to study the various rationales offered by these groups to explain the authority that the Divine Law had over them. Second Temple groups tended to look towards philosophy or metaphysics to justify the Divine Law’s authority. The tannaim, though, formulated legal arguments that obligate Israel to observe the Divine Law. While this turn towards legalism is pan-tannaitic, two distinct legal arguments can be identified in tannaitic literature. These specific arguments about the Divine Law’s authority, link to a set of issues regarding the tannaim’s conception of Divine Law and of Israel’s election.
Until very recently, the idea of ancient Jewish sciences would have been considered unacceptable. Since the 1990s, Early Modern and Medieval Science in Jewish sources has been actively studied, but the consensus was that no real scientific themes could be found in earlier Judaism. This work points them out in detail and posits a new field of research: the scientific activity evident in the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Jewish pseudepigrapha. The publication of new texts and new analyses of older ones reveals crucial elements that are best illuminated by the history of science, and may have interesting consequences for it. The contributors evaluate these texts in relation to astronomy, astrology, and physiognomy, marking the first comprehensive attempt to account for scientific themes in Second Temple Judaism. They investigate the meaning and purpose of scientific explorations in an apocalyptic setting. An appreciation of these topics paves the way to a renewed understanding of the scientific fragments scattered throughout rabbinic literature. The book first places the Jewish material in the ancient context of the Near Eastern and Hellenistic worlds. While the Jewish texts were not on the cutting edge of scientific discovery, they find a meaningful place in the history of science, between Babylonia and Egypt, in the time period between Hipparchus and Ptolemy. The book uses recent advances in method to examine the contacts and networks of Jewish scholars in their ancient setting. Second, the essays here tackle the problematic concept of a national scientific tradition. Although science is nowadays often conceived as universal, the historiography of ancient Jewish sciences demonstrates the importance of seeing the development of science in a local context. The book explores the tension between the hegemony of central scientific traditions and local scientific enterprises, showing the relevance of ancient data to contemporary postcolonial historiography of science. Finally, philosophical questions of the demarcation of science are addressed in a way that can advance the discussion of related ancient materials. Online edition available as part of the NYU Library's Ancient World Digital Library and in partnership with the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW).
Prophecy was a wide-spread phenomenon in the ancient world - not only in ancient Israel but in the whole Eastern Mediterranean cultural sphere. This is demonstrated by documents from the ancient Near East, that have been the object of Martti Nissinen’s research for more than twenty years. Nissinen's studies have had a formative influence on the study of the prophetic phenomenon. The present volume presents a selection of thirty-one essays, bringing together essential aspects of prophetic divination in the ancient Near East. The first section of the volume discusses prophecy from theoretical perspectives. The second sections contains studies on prophecy in texts from Mari and Assyria and other cuneiform sources. The third section discusses biblical prophecy in its ancient Near Eastern context, while the fourth section focuses on prophets and prophecy in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Even prophecy in the Dead Sea Scrolls is discussed in the fifth section. The articles are essential reading for anyone studying ancient prophetic phenomenon.
Worlds Full of Signs compares Greek divination to divinatory practices in Neo-Assyrian Mesopotamia and Republican Rome. It argues that the character of Greek divination differed fundamentally from that of the two comparanda. Ample attention is given to background and method at first. Subsequent chapters discuss the divinatory elements – sign, homo divinans, and text, relating divination to time and uncertainty. This book brings together sources originating from various times and places, questioning these to consider both generalities of ancient divination and specifics of Greek divination. Greek divination was inherently flexible on many levels: these findings should be connected to Greek views on time and the future as well as the relatively low level of divinatory institutionalization.