SUMERIAN LITERATURE and SUMERIAN IDENTITY My Title Puts
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
Bismya; Or the Lost City of Adab : a Story of Adventure, of Exploration
The Lost City of Adab 1 ' i %|,| / ";'M^"|('1j*)'| | Edgar James Banks l (Stanttll Wttfrmttg |fitag BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF Hcm-ij W. Sage 1891 fjjRmf... Lifoi/jL 3777 Cornell University Library DS 70.S.B5B21 Bismya: or The lost city of Adab 3 1924 028 551 913 Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028551913 The Author as an Arab. Bismya or The Lost City of Adab A Story of Adventure, of Exploration, and of Excavation among the Ruins of the Oldest of the Buried Cities of Babylonia By Edgar James Banks, Ph.D. Field Director of the Expedition of the Oriental Exploration Fund of the University of Chicago to Babylonia With 174 Illustrations G. P. Putnam's Sons New York and London Gbe IRnfcfeerbocfter press 1912 t.v. Copyright, 1912 BY EDGAR JAMES BANKS Ube TKniefeerbocftei: ipresg, mew ffiorft The University of Chicago office of the president Chicago, June 12, 1912. On the recommendation of the Director of the Baby- lonian Section of the Oriental Exploration Fund of the University of Chicago, permission has been granted to Dr. Edgar J. Banks, Field Director of the Fund at Bismya, to publish this account of his work in Mesopotamia. Dr. Banks was granted full authority in the field. He is entitled therefore to the credit for successes therein, as of course he will receive whatever criticism scholars may see fit to make. -
On Writing the History of Southern Mesopotamia* by Eva Von
On Writing the History of Southern Mesopotamia* by Eva von Dassow — Colorado State University In his book Babylonia 689-627 B.C., G. Frame provides a maximally detailed his- tory of a specific region during a closely delimited time period, based on all available sources produced during that period or bearing on it. This review article critiques the methods used to derive the history from the sources and the conceptual framework used to apprehend the subject of the history. Babylonia 689-627 B. C , the revised version of Grant Frame's doc- toral dissertation, covers one of the most turbulent and exciting periods of Babylonian history, a time during which Babylon succes- sively experienced destruction and revival at Assyria's hands, then suf- fered rebellion and siege, and lastly awaited the opportunity to over- throw Assyria and inherit most of Assyria's empire. Although, as usual, the preserved textual sources cover these years unevenly, and often are insufficiently varied in type and origin (e.g., royal or non- royal, Babylonian or Assyrian), the years from Sennacherib's destruc- tion of Babylon in 689 to the eve of Nabopolassar's accession in 626 are also a richly documented period. Frame's work is an attempt to digest all of the available sources, including archaeological evidence as well as texts, in order to produce a maximally detailed history. Sur- rounding the book's core, chapters 5-9, which proceed reign by reign through this history, are chapters focussing on the sources (ch. 2), chronology (ch. 3), the composition of Babylonia's population (ch. -
History of Babylonia
K- A -AHI BLACK STONE CONTRACT TABLET O F MARU DU N DIN , 6 page 9 . ANCIENT HISTORY FROM THE MONUMENTS. THE F BABYL I HISTORY O ONA, BY TH E LATE I GEO RGE S M TH, ES Q. , F T E EPA TM EN EN N I U IT ES B T S M E M O H T O F O I T T I I I H US U . D R R AL A Q , R ED ITED BY R EV. A . H . SAY CE, SSIST O E OR F C MP T VE P Y O O D NT P R F S S O O I HI O OG XF R . A A ARA L L , PU BLISHED U NDER THE DIRECTION O F THE COMM ITTEE O F GENERAL LITERATURE AND ED UCATION APPOINTED BY THE SOCIETY FO R PROMOTING CH ISTI N K NOW E G R A L D E. LO NDON S O IETY F R P ROMOTING C H RI TI N NO C O S A K WLEDGE . SOLD A T THE DEPOSITORIES ’ G E T U EEN ST EET LINCO LN s-INN ExE 77, R A Q R , LDs ; OY EXCH N G E 8 PICC I Y 4, R AL A ; 4 , AD LL ; A ND B OO KSE E S ALL LL R . k t New Y or : P o t, Y oung, Co. LONDON WY M N A ND S ONS rm NTERs G E T UEEN ST EET A , , R A Q R , ' LrNCOLN s - xNN FIE DS w L . -
Republic of Iraq
Republic of Iraq Babylon Nomination Dossier for Inscription of the Property on the World Heritage List January 2018 stnel oC fobalbaT Executive Summary .......................................................................................................................... 1 State Party .......................................................................................................................................................... 1 Province ............................................................................................................................................................. 1 Name of property ............................................................................................................................................... 1 Geographical coordinates to the nearest second ................................................................................................. 1 Center ................................................................................................................................................................ 1 N 32° 32’ 31.09”, E 44° 25’ 15.00” ..................................................................................................................... 1 Textural description of the boundary .................................................................................................................. 1 Criteria under which the property is nominated .................................................................................................. 4 Draft statement -
Writing and City Life
29 THEME2 writing and city life CITY life began in Mesopotamia*, the land between the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers that is now part of the Republic of Iraq. Mesopotamian civilisation is known for its prosperity, city life, its voluminous and rich literature and its mathematics and astronomy. Mesopotamia’s writing system and literature spread to the eastern Mediterranean, northern *The name Syria, and Turkey after 2000 BCE, so that the kingdoms of Mesopotamia is that entire region were writing to one another, and to the derived from the Pharaoh of Egypt, in the language and script of Mesopotamia. Greek words mesos, Here we shall explore the connection between city life and writing, and then look at some outcomes of a sustained meaning middle, tradition of writing. and potamos, In the beginning of recorded history, the land, mainly the meaning river. urbanised south (see discussion below), was called Sumer and Akkad. After 2000 BCE, when Babylon became an important city, the term Babylonia was used for the southern region. From about 1100 BCE, when the Assyrians established their kingdom in the north, the region became known as Assyria. The first known language of the land was Sumerian. It was gradually replaced by Akkadian around 2400 BCE when Akkadian speakers arrived. This language flourished till about Alexander’s time (336-323 BCE), with some regional changes occurring. From 1400 BCE, Aramaic also trickled in. This language, similar to Hebrew, became widely spoken after 1000 BCE. It is still spoken in parts of Iraq. Archaeology in Mesopotamia began in the 1840s. At one or two sites (including Uruk and Mari, which we discuss below), excavations continued for decades. -
The Sumerian King List the Sumerian King List (SKL) Dates from Around 2100 BCE—Near the Time When Abram Was in Ur
BcResources Genesis The Sumerian King List The Sumerian King List (SKL) dates from around 2100 BCE—near the time when Abram was in Ur. Most ANE scholars (following Jacobsen) attribute the original form of the SKL to Utu-hejel, king of Uruk, and his desire to legiti- mize his reign after his defeat of the Gutians. Later versions included a reference or Long Chronology), 1646 (Middle to the Great Flood and prefaced the Chronology), or 1582 (Low or Short list of postdiluvian kings with a rela- Chronology). The following chart uses tively short list of what appear to be the Middle Chronology. extremely long-reigning antediluvian Text. The SKL text for the following kings. One explanation: transcription chart was originally in a narrative form or translation errors resulting from and consisted of a composite of several confusion of the Sumerian base-60 versions (see Black, J.A., Cunningham, and the Akkadian base-10 systems G., Fluckiger-Hawker, E, Robson, E., of numbering. Dividing each ante- and Zólyomi, G., The Electronic Text diluvian figure by 60 returns reigns Corpus of Sumerian Literature (http:// in harmony with Biblical norms (the www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/), Oxford bracketed figures in the antediluvian 1998-). The text was modified by the portion of the chart). elimination of manuscript references Final versions of the SKL extended and by the addition of alternative the list to include kings up to the reign name spellings, clarifying notes, and of Damiq-ilicu, king of Isin (c. 1816- historical dates (typically in paren- 1794 BCE). thesis or brackets). The narrative was Dates. -
Babylonian Populations, Servility, and Cuneiform Records
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 60 (2017) 715-787 brill.com/jesh Babylonian Populations, Servility, and Cuneiform Records Jonathan S. Tenney Cornell University [email protected] Abstract To date, servility and servile systems in Babylonia have been explored with the tradi- tional lexical approach of Assyriology. If one examines servility as an aggregate phe- nomenon, these subjects can be investigated on a much larger scale with quantitative approaches. Using servile populations as a point of departure, this paper applies both quantitative and qualitative methods to explore Babylonian population dynamics in general; especially morbidity, mortality, and ages at which Babylonians experienced important life events. As such, it can be added to the handful of publications that have sought basic demographic data in the cuneiform record, and therefore has value to those scholars who are also interested in migration and settlement. It suggests that the origins of servile systems in Babylonia can be explained with the Nieboer-Domar hy- pothesis, which proposes that large-scale systems of bondage will arise in regions with * This was written in honor, thanks, and recognition of McGuire Gibson’s efforts to impart a sense of the influence of aggregate population behavior on Mesopotamian development, notably in his 1973 article “Population Shift and the Rise of Mesopotamian Civilization”. As an Assyriology student who was searching texts for answers to similar questions, I have occasionally found myself in uncharted waters. Mac’s encouragement helped me get past my discomfort, find the data, and put words on the page. The necessity of assembling Mesopotamian “demographic” measures was something made clear to me by the M.A.S.S. -
A Review of Maiocchi, M. Classical Sargonic Tablets Chiefly from Adab in the Cornell University Collections (CUSAS 13)
A review of Maiocchi, M. Classical Sargonic Tablets Chiefly from Adab in the Cornell University Collections (CUSAS 13). Bethesda: CDL Press, 2009 (337 pp. + xxxviii pl.), with notes on Maiocchi, M.; Visicato, G. Classical Sargo- nic Tablets hiefly from Adab in the Cornell University Collections. Part II (CUSAS 19). Bethesda: CDL Press, 2012 (208 pp.).1 The Cornell University houses one of the most important collections of the Sargonic texts in the United States.2 This corpus is being published in the Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology (CUSAS) series; by now five CUSAS volumes with Sargonic material have come out of press.3 This is the (admittedly delayed) review of CUSAS 13 (Maiocchi 2009)4 and CUSAS 19 (Maiocchi–Visicato 2012). These volumes are treated here together because most of the texts in them share the same provenance and dating. In total the books under review provide the edition of 432 cunei- form tablets mostly of Adab origin,5 with some minor groups attributed to other cities6 such as Umma, Umm-al-Hafriyat, Isin, Ešnuna and Girsu. 1 This article was prepared with the financial support from the Russian Foun- dation for the Humanities (project No.14-21-17004). The author wishes to ex- press her gratitude to this institution. 2 Detailed information on the tablet collections in the Jonathan and Jeannette Rosen Ancient Near Eastern Studies Seminar, Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. and their publication in the CUSAS series can be found at http://cuneiform.library.cornell.edu/collections. 3 These are Maiocchi 2009 (CUSAS 13), Visicato–Westenholz 2010 (CUSAS 11), Maiocchi–Visicato 2012 (CUSAS 19), Bartash 2013 (CUSAS 23) and Westenholz 2014 (CUSAS 26). -
Robson-Leick-2007.Pdf
To appear in The Babylonian World, ed. Gwendolyn Leick (London: Routledge, 2007) Mathematics, metrology, and professional numeracy Eleanor Robson • <[email protected]> Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge and All Souls College, Oxford Introduction Since the great decipherments of the 1930s and 40s (Neugebauer 1935–37; Thureau-Dangin 1938; Neugebauer and Sachs 1945) Babylonia has had a well-deserved reputation as the home of the world’s first ‘true’ mathematics, in which abstract ideas and techniques were explored and developed with no immediate practical end in mind. It is commonly understood that the base 60 systems of time measurement and angular degrees have their ultimate origins in Babylonia, and that ‘Pythagoras’ theorem’ was known there a millennium before Pythagoras himself was supposed to have lived. Most accounts of Babylonian mathematics describe the internal workings of the mathematics in great detail (e.g., Friberg 1990; Høyrup and Damerow 2001) but tell little of the reasons for its development, or anything about the people who wrote or thought about it and their reasons for doing so. However, internal textual and physical evidence from the tablets themselves, as well as museological and archaeological data, are increasingly enabling Babylonian mathematics to be understood as both a social and an intellectual activity, in relation to other scholarly pursuits and to professional scribal activity. It is important to distinguish between mathematics as an intellectual, supra-utilitarian an end in itself, and professional numeracy as the routine application of mathematical skills by working scribes. This chapter is a brief attempt at a social history of Babylonian mathematics and numeracy (see Robson forthcoming). -
The Unknown Abraham
6 The Unknown Abraham Neglected Evidence Until now, all discussions of the authenticity of the Book of Abraham have been based on the assumption that we have to deal with only two really important sources of infor- mation: the Book of Abraham and the papyri.1 Everyone, it would seem, has taken for granted that if we know what the papyri really say, we are in a position to pass judgment on the authenticity of the Book of Abraham—a proposition dili- gently cultivated by some who have assumed that a knowl- edge of Egyptian qualifies one to pass judgment on matters that lie completely outside the field. Such a case might stand up if Joseph Smith had specifically designated particular papyri as the source of his information, but he never did so. Professor Klaus Baer begins and ends his exceedingly valu- able study with the assertion that Joseph Smith thought he was actually translating the so-called “Breathing Permit.” 2 Such testimony would not hold up for three minutes in any “Part 7: The Unknown Abraham” originally appeared in the series “A New Look at the Pearl of Great Price” in IE 72 (January 1969): 26–33; (February 1969): 64– 67; (March 1969): 76, 79–80, 82, 84; (April 1969): 66–72; May 1969): 87–89. 1. See above, in this volume, CWHN 18:49–68. 2. Klaus Baer, “The Breathing Permit of Hôr,” Dialogue 3/3 (1968): 111, 133. 375 376 AN APPROACH TO THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM court of law. The only evidence for what the Prophet thought is the arrangement side by side of very brief Egyptian sym- bols and some lengthy sections of the Book of Abraham, which has led some to the hasty conclusion that the one col- umn is a would-be translation of the other. -
Marten Stol WOMEN in the ANCIENT NEAR EAST
Marten Stol WOMEN IN THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST Marten Stol Women in the Ancient Near East Marten Stol Women in the Ancient Near East Translated by Helen and Mervyn Richardson ISBN 978-1-61451-323-0 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-61451-263-9 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-0021-3 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs 3.0 License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/3.0/ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. Original edition: Vrouwen van Babylon. Prinsessen, priesteressen, prostituees in de bakermat van de cultuur. Uitgeverij Kok, Utrecht (2012). Translated by Helen and Mervyn Richardson © 2016 Walter de Gruyter Inc., Boston/Berlin Cover Image: Marten Stol Typesetting: Dörlemann Satz GmbH & Co. KG, Lemförde Printing and binding: cpi books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Table of Contents Introduction 1 Map 5 1 Her outward appearance 7 1.1 Phases of life 7 1.2 The girl 10 1.3 The virgin 13 1.4 Women’s clothing 17 1.5 Cosmetics and beauty 47 1.6 The language of women 56 1.7 Women’s names 58 2 Marriage 60 2.1 Preparations 62 2.2 Age for marrying 66 2.3 Regulations 67 2.4 The betrothal 72 2.5 The wedding 93 2.6 -
Mesopotamian Epic."
' / Prof. Scott B. Noege1 Chair, Dept. of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization University of Washington "Mesopotamian Epic." First Published in: John Miles Foley, ed. The Blackwell Companion to Ancient Epic London: Blackwell (2005), 233-245. ' / \.-/ A COMPANION TO ANCIENT EPIC Edited by John Miles Foley ~ A Blackwell '-II Publishing ~"o< - -_u - - ------ @ 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd BLACKWELL PUBLISHING 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right ofJohn Miles Foley to be identified as the Author of the Editorial Material in this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1 2005 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A companion to ancient epic / edited by John Miles Foley. p. cm. - (Blackwell companions to the ancient world. Literature and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-4051-0524-0 (alk. paper) 1. Epic poetry-History and criticism. 2. Epic literature-History and criticism. 3. Epic poetry, Classical-History and criticism. I. Foley, John Miles. II. Series. PN1317.C662005 809.1'32-dc22 2004018322 ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-0524-8 (hardback) A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.