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Learn how the deep history of nature became a dominant paradigm of historical thinking, through a study of landscapes of India. Winner of the BSHS Pickstone Prize by the British Society for the History of Science, Shortlisted for the Pfizer Award for an Outstanding Book in the History of Science by the History of Science Society In the nineteenth century, teams of men began digging the earth like never before. Sometimes this digging—often for sewage, transport, or minerals—revealed human remains. Other times, archaeological excavation of ancient cities unearthed prehistoric fossils, while excavations for irrigation canals revealed buried cities. Concurrently, geologists, ethnologists, archaeologists, and missionaries were also digging into ancient texts and genealogies and delving into the lives and bodies of indigenous populations, their myths, legends, and pasts. One pursuit was intertwined with another in this encounter with the earth and its inhabitants—past, present, and future. In Inscriptions of Nature, Pratik Chakrabarti argues that, in both the real and the metaphorical digging of the earth, the deep history of nature, landscape, and people became indelibly inscribed in the study and imagination of antiquity. The first book to situate deep history as an expression of political, economic, and cultural power, this volume shows that it is complicit in the European and colonial appropriation of global nature, commodities, temporalities, and myths. The book also provides a new interpretation of the relationship between nature and history. Arguing that the deep history of the earth became pervasive within historical imaginations of monuments, communities, and territories in the nineteenth century, Chakrabarti studies these processes in the Indian subcontinent, from the banks of the Yamuna and Ganga rivers to the Himalayas to the deep ravines and forests of central India. He also examines associated themes of Hindu antiquarianism, sacred geographies, and tribal aboriginality. Based on extensive archival research, the book provides insights into state formation, mining of natural resources, and the creation of national topographies. Driven by the geological imagination of India as well as its landscape, people, past, and destiny, Inscriptions of Nature reveals how human evolution, myths, aboriginality, and colonial state formation fundamentally defined Indian antiquity.
Why would an inkstone have a poem inscribed on it? Early modern Chinese writers did not limit themselves to working with brushes and ink, and their texts were not confined to woodblock-printed books or the boundaries of the paper page. Poets carved lines of verse onto cups, ladles, animal horns, seashells, walking sticks, boxes, fans, daggers, teapots, and musical instruments. Calligraphers left messages on the implements ordinarily used for writing on paper. These inscriptions—terse compositions in verse or epigrammatic prose—relate in complex ways to the objects on which they are written. Thomas Kelly develops a new account of the relationship between Chinese literature and material culture by examining inscribed objects from the late Ming and early to mid-Qing dynasties. He considers how the literary qualities of inscriptions interact with the visual and physical properties of the things that bear them. Kelly argues that inscribing an object became a means for authors to grapple with the materiality and technologies of writing. Facing profound social upheavals, from volatility in the marketplace to the violence of dynastic transition, writers turned to inscriptions to reflect on their investments in and dependence on the permanence of the written word. Shedding new light on cultures of writing in early modern China, The Inscription of Things broadens understandings of the links between the literary and the material.
This book relates in particular to the Javanese inscriptions of the period A.D. 901-929, a time of special interest because of the transfer of royal government from Central to East Java. With the aid of inscriptions from this period, as well as before and after, it is possible to draw tentative conclusions which seek the explanation for this shift not so much in the area of political but of socio-economic history. This is the first study to pay attention to the role of socio-economic factors in early Javanese history. By examining the Old Javanese inscriptions in detail, it is possible to produce valuable information on trade—merchandise and merchants; on the administrative system as it affected the change in the country-side—the sima and the watěk; and on the many officials who were involved in the carrying out the king’s orders as the affected the change in tax-status of a foundation. The book contains full lists of various categories of items from the inscriptions which provide a basis for the renewed study of Old Javanese epigraphic materials.
An ethnography of the tattoo community, tracing the practice's transformation from a mostly male, working-class phenomenon to one adapted and propagated by a more middle-class movement in the period from the 1970s to the present.
Artistic and epigraphic evidence suggest that Elijah's Cave, on the western slope of Mt. Carmel, had been used as a pagan cultic place, possibly a shrine, devoted to Ba'al Carmel (identified with Zeus/Jupiter) as well as to Pan and Eros as secondary deities.
Inscriptions convey meaning not just by their contents but also by other means, such as choice of script, location, scale, spatial organisation, letterform, legibility and clarity. The essays in this book consider these visual qualities of inscriptions, ranging across the Mediterranean and the Near East from Spain to Iran and beyond, including Norman Sicily, Islamic North Africa, Byzantium, medieval Italy, Georgia and Armenia. While most essays focus on Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, they also look back at Achaemenid Iran and forward to Mughal India. Topics discussed include real and pseudo-writing, multilingual inscriptions, graffiti, writing disguised as images and images disguised as words. From public texts set up on mountainsides or on church and madrasa walls to intimate craftsmen's signatures, barely visible on the undersides of precious objects, the inscriptions discussed in this volume reveal their meanings as textual and visual devices.
The Arts and Crafts of Older Spain in three volumes is a study of ancient and medieval art on the Iberian Peninsula written with a goal to provide a clear and fairly complete account of the decorative arts and techniques from the country of Don Quixote. The work is divided in three parts: The first part deals with gold, silver, and jewel work, iron-work, bronzes and arms; The second part deals with furniture, ivories, pottery, and glass; and the final third part deals with Spanish silk, cloths and woolens, embroidery, tapestry and lace, with few additional accounts concerning different forms of artistic expression.
The walls of the Assyrian palaces, as well as throne bases, doors and thresholds, were adorned with inscriptions. These inscriptions were surrounded in mystery and esoteric knowledge of their creation and meaning, and deal with a number of different subjects concerned with Assyrian kings and their achievements and exploits.
The Neo-Assyrian king Sargon II was one of the most important and famous rulers of ancient Mesopotamia. In this volume of critically important ancient documents, Grant Frame presents reliable, updated editions of Sargon’s approximately 130 historical inscriptions, as well as several from his wife, his brother, and other high officials. Beginning with a thorough introduction to the reign of Sargon II and an overview of the previous scholarship on his inscriptions, this modern scholarly edition contains the entire extant corpus. It presents more than 130 inscriptions, preserved on stone wall slabs from his palace, paving slabs, colossi, steles, prisms, cylinders, bricks, metal, and other objects, along with brief introductions, commentaries, comprehensive bibliographies, accurate transliterations, and elegant English translations of the Akkadian texts. This monumental work is complemented by more than two dozen photographs of the inscribed objects; indices of museum and excavation numbers, selected publications, and proper names; and translations of relevant passages from several other Akkadian texts, including chronicles and king lists. Informed by advances in the study of the Akkadian language and featuring more than twice as many texts as previous editions of Sargon II’s inscriptions, this will be the editio princeps for Assyriologists and students of the Sargonic inscriptions for decades to come.