Elementary Education in Early Second Millennium BCE Babylonia PDF Download

Author: Alhena Gadotti
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 1646021797
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 636

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Book Description
In this volume, Alhena Gadotti and Alexandra Kleinerman investigate how Akkadian speakers learned Sumerian during the Old Babylonian period in areas outside major cities. Despite the fact that it was a dead language at the time, Sumerian was considered a crucial part of scribal training due to its cultural importance. This book provides transliterations and translations of 715 cuneiform scribal school exercise texts from the Jonathan and Jeanette Rosen Ancient Near Eastern Studies Collection at Cornell University. These tablets, consisting mainly of lexical texts, illustrate the process of elementary foreign-language training at scribal schools during the Old Babylonian period. Although the tablets are all without provenance, discrepancies between these texts and those from other sites, such as Nippur and Ur, strongly suggest that the texts published here do not come from a previously studied location. Comparing these tablets with previously published documents, Gadotti and Kleinerman argue that elementary education in Mesopotamia was relatively standardized and that knowledge of cuneiform writing was more widespread than previously assumed. By refining our understanding of education in southern Mesopotamia, this volume elucidates more fully the pedagogical underpinnings of the world’s first curriculum devised to teach a dead language. As a text edition, it will make these important documents accessible to Assyriologists and Sumerologists for future study.

Author: Gina Konstantopoulos
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004546138
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
In The Divine/Demonic Seven and the Place of Demons in Mesopotamia, Gina Konstantopoulos analyses the Sebettu, a group of seven divine/demonic figures found across a wide range of Mesopotamian textual and artistic sources in Mesopotamia from the late third to first millennium BCE. The Sebettu appeared both as fierce, threatening demons and as divine, protective, figures. These seemingly contradictory qualities worked together, as their martial ferocity facilitated their religious and political role. When used in royal inscriptions, they became fierce warriors attacking the king’s enemies, retaining that demonic nature. This flexibility was not unique to the Sebettu, and this study thus provides a lens through which to examine the place of demons in Mesopotamia as a whole.

Author: Susanne Paulus
Publisher: Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures
ISBN: 1614910995
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
This volume—the companion book to the special exhibition Back to School in Babylonia of the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures of the University of Chicago—explores education in the Old Babylonian period through the lens of House F in Nippur, excavated jointly by the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1950s and widely believed to have been a scribal school. The book's twenty essays offer a state-of-the-art synthesis of research on the history of House F and the educational curriculum documented on the many tablets discovered there, while the catalog's five chapters present the 126 objects included in the exhibition, the vast majority of them cuneiform tablets.

Author: Amanda H. Podany
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190059044
Category : Middle East
Languages : en
Pages : 673

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Book Description
"This sweeping history of the ancient Near East (Mesopotamia, Syria, Anatolia, Iran) takes readers on a journey from the creation of the world's first cities to the conquest of Alexander the Great. The book is built around the life stories of many ancient men and women, from kings, priestesses, and merchants to bricklayers, musicians, and weavers. Their habits of daily life, beliefs, triumphs, and crises, and the changes that they faced over time are explored through their written words and the archaeological remains of the buildings, cities, and empires in which they lived. Rather than chronicling three thousand years of kingdoms, the book instead creates a tapestry of life stories through which readers come to know specific individuals from many walks of life, and to understand their places within the broad history of events and institutions in the ancient Near East. These life stories are preserved on ancient cuneiform tablets, which allow us to trace, for example, the career of a weaver as she advanced to became a supervisor of a workshop, listen to a king trying to persuade his generals to prepare for a siege, and feel the pain of a starving young couple who were driven to sell all four of their young children into slavery during a famine. What might seem at first glance to be a remote and inaccessible ancient culture proves to be a comprehensible world, one that bequeathed to us many of our institutions and beliefs, a truly fascinating place to visit"--

Author: Dahlia Shehata
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004697578
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
This volume lays theoretical and methodological groundwork for the analysis of Mesopotamian literature. A comprehensive first chapter by the editors explores critical contemporary issues in Sumerian and Akkadian narrative analysis, and nine case studies written by an international array of scholars test the responsiveness of Sumerian and Akkadian narratives to diverse approaches drawn from literary studies and theories of fiction. Included are intertextual and transtextual analyses, studies of narrative structure and focalization, and treatments of character and characterization. Works considered include the Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic and many other Sumerian and Akkadian narratives of gods, heroes, kings, and monsters.

Author: Robert Middeke-Conlin
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031452267
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
This book examines education as a means to explore knowledge and literacy in the Old Babylonian period. It further employs a new method to research these topics. Contrary to numerous existing studies on the subject, the author examines elementary education globally, that is, in pursuit of Old Babylonian education in its entirety. Typically, education is examined in a piecemeal fashion. It's as if education centered on lexicography alone or mathematics alone. This work encompasses a view about educational content and knowledge systems, as opposed to only specific aspects or branches of them. In doing so, a characterization of institution and society is made possible allowing the work to open new general perspectives on Mesopotamian knowledge, literacy, and education.

Author: Gina Konstantopoulos
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900453976X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
How were narratives composed in the ancient Near East? What patterns and principles, constraints and considerations guided the shaping of cuneiform stories? The study of narrative structures has emerged as a promising approach to the textual heritage of the cuneiform world. Engaging with practically any ancient text—whether literary, historical, or religious—requires some understanding of the narrative forms that shaped their content. This volume gives researchers the tools to better understand those form, illustrating each approach to narrative analysis with a case study from the cultures of the ancient Near East: Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Hittite.

Author: Pamela Barmash
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197525415
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Among the best-known and most esteemed people known from antiquity is the Babylonian king Hammurabi. His fame and reputation are due to the collection of laws written under his patronage. This book offers an innovative interpretation of the Laws of Hammurabi. Ancient scribes would demonstrate their legal flair by composing statutes on a set of traditional cases, articulating what they deemed just and fair. The scribe of the Laws of Hammurabi advanced beyond earlier scribes in composing statutes that manifest systematization and implicit legal principles, and inserted the Laws of Hammurabi into the form of a royal inscription, shrewdly reshaping the genre. This tradition of scribal improvisation on a set of traditional cases continued outside of Mesopotamia. It influenced biblical law and the law of the Hittite empire significantly. The Laws of Hammurabi was also witness to the start of another stream of intellectual tradition. It became the subject of formal commentaries, marking a profound cultural shift. Scribes related to it in ways that diverged from prior attitudes; it became an object of study and of commentary, a genre that names itself as dependent on another text. The famous Laws of Hammurabi is here given the extensive attention it continues to merit.

Author: Alexandra Kleinerman
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004212426
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
This book examines a collection of twenty-two literary letters and related compositions, the Sumerian Epistolary Miscellany, studied as part of the Old Babylonian Sumerian scribal curriculum, in an attempt to better understand the nature of the curriculum as a whole.

Author: Lluís Feliu
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501503693
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description
This volume is dedicated to Miguel Civil in celebration of his 90th birthday. Civil has been one of the most influential scholars in the field of Sumerian studies over the course of his long career. This anniversary presents a welcome occasion to reflect on some aspects of the field in which he has been such a driving force.