[PDF] Of Priests And Kings The Babylonian New Year Festival In The Last Age Of Cuneiform Culture eBook

Author : Céline Debourse
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 524 pages
File Size : 18,45 MB
Release : 2022-02-28
Category : History
ISBN : 9004513035

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Editing and examining source-critically for the first time the Late Babylonian ritual texts dealing with the New Year Festival, this book proposes an incisive re-interpretation of the most frequently discussed of all Mesopotamian rituals.

Author : Anke Walter
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 100 pages
File Size : 17,35 MB
Release : 2024-04
Category : History
ISBN : 3111366871

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How can time become festive? How do festivals manage to make time 'special', to mark out a certain day or days, to distinguish them from 'normal', everyday time, and to fill them with meaning? And how can we reconstruct what festive time looked like in the past and what people thought about it? While a lot of research has been done on festivals from the point of view of several scholarly disciplines, the specific temporality of festivals has not yet attracted sufficient attention. In this volume, scholars from different fields provide answers to the questions raised above, based on a fresh analysis of astronomical documents, calendars, and literary texts. Cultures as diverse as ancient Babylon, Greece and Rome, and medieval China all share a sense of calendrically recurring festive time as something special that needs to be carefully mapped out and preserved, often with great sophistication, and that gives us precious insights into the broader religious, political, and social dimensions of time within past cultures.

Author : Mary Frazer
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 593 pages
File Size : 41,11 MB
Release : 2024-06-20
Category : History
ISBN : 9004685944

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Akkadian Royal Letters in Later Mespotamian Tradition reconsiders the question of the authenticity of the letters attributed to earlier royal correspondents that were studied in Assyrian and Babylonian scribal centres ca. 700–100 BCE. By scrutinizing the letters’ contents, language, possible transmission histories ca. 1400–100 BCE and the epistemic limitations of authenticity criticism, the book grounds scepticism about the letters’ authenticity in previously undiscussed features of the texts. It also provides a new foundation for research into the related questions of when and why these beguiling texts were composed in the first place.

Author : Tova Ganzel
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 231 pages
File Size : 34,12 MB
Release : 2021-09-07
Category : Religion
ISBN : 3110740990

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Ezekiel's Visionary Temple in Babylonian Context examines evidence from Babylonian sources to better understand Ezekiel's vision of the future temple as it appears in chapters 40–48. Tova Ganzel argues that Neo-Babylonian temples provide a meaningful backdrop against which many unique features of Ezekiel's vision can and should be interpreted. In pointing to the similarities between Neo-Babylonian temples and the description in the book of Ezekiel, Ganzel demonstrates how these temples served as a context for the prophet's visions and describes the extent to which these similarities provide a further basis for broader research of the connections between Babylonia and the Bible. Ultimately, she argues the extent to which the book of Ezekiel models its temple on those of the Babylonians. Thus, this book suggests a comprehensive picture of the book of Ezekiel’s worldview and to contextualize its visionary temple by comparing its vision to the actual temples surrounding the Judeans in exile.

Author : Thomas Galoppin
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 1274 pages
File Size : 38,12 MB
Release : 2022-12-31
Category : Religion
ISBN : 311079845X

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Ancient religions are definitely complex systems of gods, which resist our understanding. Divine names provide fundamental keys to gain access to the multiples ways gods were conceived, characterized, and organized. Among the names given to the gods many of them refer to spaces: cities, landscapes, sanctuaries, houses, cosmic elements. They reflect mental maps which need to be explored in order to gain new knowledge on both the structure of the pantheons and the human agency in the cultic dimension. By considering the intersection between naming and mapping, this book opens up new perspectives on how tradition and innovation, appropriation and creation play a role in the making of polytheistic and monotheistic religions. Far from being confined to sanctuaries, in fact, gods dwell in human environments in multiple ways. They move into imaginary spaces and explore the cosmos. By proposing a new and interdiciplinary angle of approach, which involves texts, images, spatial and archeaeological data, this book sheds light on ritual practices and representations of gods in the whole Mediterranean, from Italy to Mesopotamia, from Greece to North Africa and Egypt. Names and spaces enable to better define, differentiate, and connect gods.

Author : Eckart Frahm
Publisher : Basic Books
Page : 501 pages
File Size : 48,66 MB
Release : 2023-04-04
Category : History
ISBN : 1541674391

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A new history of Assyria, the ancient civilization that set the model for future empires At its height in 660 BCE, the kingdom of Assyria stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. It was the first empire the world had ever seen. Here, historian Eckart Frahm tells the epic story of Assyria and its formative role in global history. Assyria’s wide-ranging conquests have long been known from the Hebrew Bible and later Greek accounts. But nearly two centuries of research now permit a rich picture of the Assyrians and their empire beyond the battlefield: their vast libraries and monumental sculptures, their elaborate trade and information networks, and the crucial role played by royal women. Although Assyria was crushed by rising powers in the late seventh century BCE, its legacy endured from the Babylonian and Persian empires to Rome and beyond. Assyria is a stunning and authoritative account of a civilization essential to understanding the ancient world and our own.

Author : Karen Radner
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 1089 pages
File Size : 42,15 MB
Release : 2023-04-18
Category : Egypt
ISBN : 0190687665

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This groundbreaking, five-volume series offers a comprehensive, fully illustrated history of Egypt and Western Asia (the Levant, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Iran), from the emergence of complex states to the conquest of Alexander the Great. Written by a diverse, international team of leading scholars whose expertise brings to life the people, places, and times of the remote past, the volumes in this series focus firmly on the political and social histories of the states and communities of the ancient Near East. Individual chapters present the key textual and material sources underpinning the historical reconstruction, paying particular attention to the most recent archaeological finds and their impact on our historical understanding of the periods surveyed. The fifth and final volume of the Oxford History of the Ancient Near East covers the period from the second half of the 7th century BC until the campaigns of Alexander III of Macedon (336-323 BC) brought an end to the Achaemenid Dynasty and the Persian Empire. Tying together areas and political developments covered by previous volumes in the series, this title covers also the Persian Empire's immediate predecessor states: Saite Egypt, the Neo-Babylonian Empire, and Lydia, among other kingdoms and tribal alliances. The chapters in this volume feature a wide range of archaeological and textual sources, with contributors displaying a masterful treatment of the challenges and advantages of the available materials. Two chapters focus on areas that have not enjoyed prominence in any of the previous volumes of this series: eastern Iran and Central Asia. This volume is the necessary and complementary final component of this comprehensive series.

Author : Karen Radner
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 838 pages
File Size : 38,40 MB
Release : 2011-09-22
Category : History
ISBN : 019161761X

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The cuneiform script, the writing system of ancient Mesopotamia, was witness to one of the world's oldest literate cultures. For over three millennia, it was the vehicle of communication from (at its greatest extent) Iran to the Mediterranean, Anatolia to Egypt. The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture examines the Ancient Middle East through the lens of cuneiform writing. The contributors, a mix of scholars from across the disciplines, explore, define, and to some extent look beyond the boundaries of the written word, using Mesopotamia's clay tablets and stone inscriptions not just as 'texts' but also as material artefacts that offer much additional information about their creators, readers, users and owners.

Author : Norman H. Snaith
Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers
Page : 231 pages
File Size : 49,67 MB
Release : 2016-08-11
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1498295681

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"This study has its origin in a twenty-year-old interest in Sigmund Mowinckel's theory of an annual new year Coronation Feast of Jehovah in Israel. The first outcome of this interest was a volume entitled Studies in the Psalter (1934) in which I endeavored to show that the psalms which Mowinckel associated most closely with this supposed Coronation Feast were actually post-exilic, and in any case were Sabbath psalms. It is impossible, if my thesis is sound, that these psalms could ever have been and the apparatus of a pre-exilic feast of the type which Mowinckel proposed." --From the Preface