The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture

NOTE EDITORE

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.

SOMMARIO

1 - Tablets as artefacts, scribes as artisans2 - Accounting in proto-cuneiform3 - Numeracy and metrology4 - Levels of literacy5 - Literacy and gender6 - The person in Mesopotamian thought7 - The scribe of the Flood Story and his circle8 - Feasts for the living, the dead, and the gods9 - Cuneiform writing in Neo-Babylonian temple communities10 - Freedom in ancient Near Eastern societies11 - Teacher-student relationships: two case studies12 - Patron and client: Zimri-Lim and Asqudum the diviner13 - Learned, rich, famous and unhappy: Ur-Utu of Sippar14 - Music, the work of professionals15 - The education of Neo-Assyrian princes16 - Judicial decision-making: judges and arbitrators17 - Royal decision-making: kings, magnates and scholars18 - Assyria at war: strategy and conduct19 - Manipulating the gods: lamenting in context20 - Magic rituals: conceptualisation and performance21 - Sheep and sky: systems of divinatory interpretation22 - Making sense of time: observational and theoretical calendars23 - Letters as correspondence, letters as literature24 - Keeping company with men of learning: the king as scholar25 - From street altar to palace: reading the built environment of urban Babylonia26 - The production and dissemination of scholarly knowledge27 - Tablets of schools and scholars: a portrait of the Old Babylonian corpus28 - Adapting to new contexts: cuneiform in Anatolia29 - Observing and describing the world through divination and astronomy30 - Berossos between tradition and innovation31 - Agriculture as civilization: sages, farmers, and barbarians32 - Sourcing, organising, and administering medicinal ingredients33 - Changing images of kingship in Sumerian literature34 - The pious king: royal patronage of temples35 - Cuneiform culture's last guardians: the old urban notability of Hellenistic Uruk

AUTORE

Karen Radner (PhD Vienna 1997, Habilation Munich 2004) is the Alexander von Humboldt Professor for Ancient History of the Near and Middle East at LMU Munich. Her main research interests are in Assyria, especially the period from the 9th to the 7th centuries BC, on whose political, social, economic, legal, and religious history she has published extensively. Her books include editions of Middle and Neo-Assyrian archives and a study on how awareness of man's mortality shaped Mesopotamian culture (Die Macht des Namens: altorientalische Strategien zur Selbsterhaltung, 2005). She directs an AHRC-funded research project on the correspondence between the Assyrian kings and their magnates in the 8th century BC (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sargon). Eleanor Robson is Professor of Ancient Middle Eastern History at University College London. Her research focuses on the socio-political contexts of intellectual activity in ancient Mesopotamia and the online edition of cuneiform texts. She is the author of Mathematics in Ancient Iraq: A Social History (2008) and director of the AHRC-funded research project, The Geography of Knowledge in Assyria and Babylonia, 700-200 BC (http://oracc.org/gkab).

ALTRE INFORMAZIONI

• Condizione: Nuovo
• ISBN: 9780198856030
• Collana: Oxford Handbooks
• Dimensioni: 247 x 40.0 x 173 mm Ø 1588 gr
• Formato: Brossura
• Pagine Arabe: 848