Author: Amar Annus Publisher: Oriental Inst Publications Sales ISBN: 9781885923684 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 351
Book Description
The concept of sign, a portent observed in the physical world, which indicates future events, is found in all ancient cultures, but was first developed in ancient Mesopotamian texts. This branch of Babylonian scientific knowledge extensively influenced other parts of the world, and similar texts written in Aramaic, Sanscrit, Sogdian, and other languages. The seminar will investigate how much do we know about the Babylonian theory and hermeneutics of omens, and the scope of their possible influences on other cultures and regions.
Author: Peter Struck Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691183457 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
Divination and Human Nature casts a new perspective on the rich tradition of ancient divination—the reading of divine signs in oracles, omens, and dreams. Popular attitudes during classical antiquity saw these readings as signs from the gods while modern scholars have treated such beliefs as primitive superstitions. In this book, Peter Struck reveals instead that such phenomena provoked an entirely different accounting from the ancient philosophers. These philosophers produced subtle studies into what was an odd but observable fact—that humans could sometimes have uncanny insights—and their work signifies an early chapter in the cognitive history of intuition. Examining the writings of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Neoplatonists, Struck demonstrates that they all observed how, setting aside the charlatans and swindlers, some people had premonitions defying the typical bounds of rationality. Given the wide differences among these ancient thinkers, Struck notes that they converged on seeing this surplus insight as an artifact of human nature, projections produced under specific conditions by our physiology. For the philosophers, such unexplained insights invited a speculative search for an alternative and more naturalistic system of cognition. Recovering a lost piece of an ancient tradition, Divination and Human Nature illustrates how philosophers of the classical era interpreted the phenomena of divination as a practice closer to intuition and instinct than magic.
Author: Veit Rosenberger Publisher: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden gmbh ISBN: 9783515106290 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 177
Book Description
The search for knowledge of the future and for divine help is found in all ancient Mediterranean cultures. The key question of this book is: What are the interdependences between divination and processes of individualization or de-individualization in the ancient world? Individualization is understood as a process of change on the societal level. In contrast, individuation is a development on the personal level. Discussions about the definition of these terms are continuing. Divination may always have some effects on processes of individuation and individualization. Divination may be a means - and this list does not claim to be exhaustive - of legitimising decisions, to decide competition or to achieve distinctiveness. This book covers aspects from archaic Greece to the High Empire. Not all articles argue along the same lines: nothing highlights better the lively debate and the many open questions in the field of ancient divination.
Author: Kim Beerden Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 900425630X Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
Worlds Full of Signs compares Greek divination to divinatory practices in Neo-Assyrian Mesopotamia and Republican Rome. It argues that the character of Greek divination differed fundamentally from that of the two comparanda. Ample attention is given to background and method at first. Subsequent chapters discuss the divinatory elements – sign, homo divinans, and text, relating divination to time and uncertainty. This book brings together sources originating from various times and places, questioning these to consider both generalities of ancient divination and specifics of Greek divination. Greek divination was inherently flexible on many levels: these findings should be connected to Greek views on time and the future as well as the relatively low level of divinatory institutionalization.
Author: Krzysztof Ulanowski Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004429395 Category : Body, Mind & Spirit Languages : en Pages : 588
Book Description
Neo-Assyrian and Greek Divination in War focuses on all divinatory practices which were used in the ancient Near East and Greece in time of war. Divination was a practical way of discovering the will of the gods, and enabled human contact with the divine. Divinatory practices were crucial to decision-taking. The results of divination were especially important during war. This book concentrates on the methods used to obtain all possible information from the divine world which could impact on the results of war. Knowledge of divine plans, verdicts and favors would ensure victory, power and eternal glory. This book is also about the convergence of the ancient Near East and Greek divinatory systems, methods and practices. Step by step, it points out that the Greeks treated divination in a very similar way to the Mesopotamians, and presents the possible routes of transmission of this divine knowledge, which was practiced in both cultures by a group of well-trained professionals.
Author: Lindsay Gayle Driediger-Murphy Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0198844549 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 309
Book Description
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This volume sets out to re-examine what ancient people - primarily those in ancient Greek and Roman communities, but also Mesopotamian and Chinese cultures - thought they were doing through divination, and what this can tell us about the religions and cultures in which divination was practised. The chapters, authored by a range of established experts and upcoming early-career scholars, engage with four shared questions: What kinds of gods do ancient forms of divination presuppose? What beliefs, anxieties, and hopes did divination seek to address? What were the limits of human 'control' of divination? What kinds of human-divine relationships did divination create/sustain? The volume as a whole seeks to move beyond functionalist approaches to divination in order to identify and elucidate previously understudied aspects of ancient divinatory experience and practice. Special attention is paid to the experiences of non-elites, the perception of divine presence, the ways in which divinatory techniques could surprise their users by yielding unexpected or unwanted results, the difficulties of interpretation with which divinatory experts were thought to contend, and the possibility that divination could not just ease, but also exacerbate, anxiety in practitioners and consultants.
Author: Sarah Iles Johnston Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9047407962 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 328
Book Description
This book thoroughly revisits divination as a central phenomenon in the lives of ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians. It collects studies from many periods in Graeco-Roman history, from the Archaic period to the late Roman, and touches on many different areas of this rich topic, including treatments of dice oracles, sortition in both pagan and Christian contexts, the overlap between divination and other interpretive practices in antiquity, the fortunes of independent diviners, the activity of Delphi in ordering relations with the dead, the role of Egyptian cult centers in divinatory practices, and the surreptitious survival of recipes for divination by corpses. It also reflects a ranges of methodologies, drawn from anthropology, history of religions, intellectual history, literary studies, and archaeology, epigraphy, and paleography. It will be of particular interest to scholars and student of ancient Mediterranean religions.
Author: Martti Nissinen Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 3110467763 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 804
Book Description
Prophecy was a wide-spread phenomenon in the ancient world - not only in ancient Israel but in the whole Eastern Mediterranean cultural sphere. This is demonstrated by documents from the ancient Near East, that have been the object of Martti Nissinen’s research for more than twenty years. Nissinen's studies have had a formative influence on the study of the prophetic phenomenon. The present volume presents a selection of thirty-one essays, bringing together essential aspects of prophetic divination in the ancient Near East. The first section of the volume discusses prophecy from theoretical perspectives. The second sections contains studies on prophecy in texts from Mari and Assyria and other cuneiform sources. The third section discusses biblical prophecy in its ancient Near Eastern context, while the fourth section focuses on prophets and prophecy in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Even prophecy in the Dead Sea Scrolls is discussed in the fifth section. The articles are essential reading for anyone studying ancient prophetic phenomenon.
Author: Karen Radner Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 019161761X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 838
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: Amar Annus
Author: Peter Struck
Author: Veit Rosenberger
Author: Kim Beerden
Author: Krzysztof Ulanowski
Author: Lindsay Gayle Driediger-Murphy
Author: Stefan M. Maul
Author: Sarah Iles Johnston
Author: Martti Nissinen
Author: Karen Radner