Mesopotamian Magic PDF Download

Author: I. Tzvi Abusch
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789056930332
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
This volume, edited by Tzvi Zbusch and Karel van der Toorn, contains the papers delivered at the first international conference on Mesopotamian magic held under the auspices of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) in June 1995. It is the first collective volume dedicated to the study of this topic. It aims at serving as a bench-mark and provides analytic and innovative but also sythetic and programmatic essays. Magical texts, forms, and traditions from the Mesopotamian cultural worlds of the third millennium BCE through the first millennium CE, in the Sumerian, Akkadian and Aramaic languages as well as in art, are examined.

Author: Tzvi Abusch
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004496297
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
This volume, edited by Tzvi Zbusch and Karel van der Toorn, contains the papers delivered at the first international conference on Mesopotamian magic held under the auspices of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) in June 1995. It is the first collective volume dedicated to the study of this topic. It aims at serving as a bench-mark and provides analytic and innovative but also sythetic and programmatic essays. Magical texts, forms, and traditions from the Mesopotamian cultural worlds of the third millennium BCE through the first millennium CE, in the Sumerian, Akkadian and Aramaic languages as well as in art, are examined.

Author: J. Cale Johnson
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 1646020960
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
The missing piece in so many histories of Mesopotamian technical disciplines is the client, who often goes unnoticed by present-day scholars seeking to reconstruct ancient disciplines in the Near East over millennia. The contributions to this volume investigate how Mesopotamian medical specialists interacted with their patients and, in doing so, forged their social and professional identities. The chapters in this book explore rituals for success at court, the social classes who made use of such rituals, and depictions of technical specialists on seal impressions and in later Greco-Roman iconography. Several essays focus on Egalkura: rituals of entering the court, meant to invoke a favorable impression from the sovereign. These include detailed surveys and comparative studies of the genre and its roots in the emergent astrological paradigm of the late first millennium BC. The different media and modalities of interaction between technical specialists and their clients are also a central theme explored in detailed studies of the sickbed scene in the iconography of Mesopotamian cylinder seals and the transmission of specialized pharmaceutical knowledge from the Mesopotamian to the Greco-Roman world. Offering an encyclopedic survey of ritual clients attested in the cuneiform textual record, this volume outlines both the Mesopotamian and the Greco-Roman social contexts in which these rituals were used. It will be of interest to students of the history of medicine, as well as to students and scholars of ancient Mesopotamia. In addition to the editor, the contributors include Netanel Anor, Siam Bhayro, Strahil V. Panayotov, Maddalena Rumor, Marvin Schreiber, JoAnn Scurlock, and Ulrike Steinert.

Author: Karen Radner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019161761X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 838

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Book Description
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:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004687416
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
As magic is a powerful means to influence the natural world and human beings, and is deeply connected to the divine sphere, persons using it are in constant need to justify its use. The ambivalence of magic to serve both well-wishing and ill-wishing aims puts the practitioners ever at risk. This volume illuminates the strategies adopted to legitimise the practice of magic and analyses how these justifications are phrased and formulated in cuneiform texts, thereby revealing the underlying principles and unexplained axioms of using magic in the Ancient Near East.

Author: David Frankfurter
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004390758
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 817

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Book Description
This volume seeks to advance the study of ancient magic through separate discussions of ancient terms for ambiguous or illicit ritual, the ancient texts commonly designated magical, and contexts in which the term magic may be used descriptively.

Author: JoAnn Scurlock
Publisher: Society of Biblical Lit
ISBN: 1589839714
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 785

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Book Description
!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" html meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="content-type" body An introductory guide for scholars and students of the ancient Near East and the history of medicine In this collection JoAnn Scurlock assembles and translates medical texts that provided instructions for ancient doctors and pharmacists. Scurlock unpacks the difficult, technical vocabulary that describes signs and symptoms as well as procedures and plants used in treatments. This fascinating material shines light on the development of medicine in the ancient Near East, yet these tablets were essentially inaccessible to anyone without an expertise in cuneiform. Scurlock’s work fills this gap by providing a key resource for teaching and research. Features: Accessible translations and transliterations for both specialists and non-specialists Texts include a range of historical periods and regions Therapeutic, pharmacological, and diagnostic texts

Author: Ulrike Steinert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351335103
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Systems of Classification in Premodern Medical Cultures puts historical disease concepts in cross-cultural perspective, investigating perceptions, constructions and experiences of health and illness from antiquity to the seventeenth century. Focusing on the systematisation and classification of illness in its multiple forms, manifestations and causes, this volume examines case studies ranging from popular concepts of illness through to specialist discourses on it. Using philological, historical and anthropological approaches, the contributions cover perspectives across time from East Asian, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures, spanning ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome to Tibet and China. They aim to capture the multiplicity of disease concepts and medical traditions within specific societies, and to investigate the historical dynamics of stability and change linked to such concepts. Providing useful material for comparative research, the volume is a key resource for researchers studying the cultural conceptualisation of illness, including anthropologists, historians and classicists, among others.

Author: Walter Farber
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 1575068826
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 487

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Book Description
Lamaštu was one of the most important Mesopotamian demons, playing a dominant role in the magico-religious and magico-medical beliefs and practices of ancient Mesopotamia for nearly two millennia. Yet, she has never been the subject of a scholarly monograph dedicated to the textual and visual evidence for her, her activities, and the measures that ancient magical specialists took to counter her. This volume also falls short of this description, because it covers only one part of the material: it is an edition of the textual record only, which is, however, collected here as completely as seems possible today. Walter Farber, who has studied these materials for decades, presents a comprehensive collection of all of the known texts, the texts of the primary incantations in a “score” format, and transliteration and translation of a number of ancillary texts. This much-awaited volume will fill the void in the literature on this aspect of the life and thought of ancient Mesopotamian peoples regarding the character of this malevolent creature and the means of warding off the threat that she posed.

Author: I. Tzvi Abusch
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004123878
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
This volume is about the history, literature, ritual, and thought associated with ancient Mesopotamian witchcraft. With chapters on the changing forms and roles of witchcraft beliefs, the ritual function, form, and development of the Maqlû text (the most important ancient work on the subject), and the meaning of the Maqlû ceremony, as well as the ideology of the final version of the text. The volume significantly contributes to our understanding of the Maqlû text, and the reconstruction of the development of thought about witchcraft and magic in Mesopotamia.