This interdisciplinary volume is a ‘one-stop location’ for the most up-to-date scholarship on Southern Levantine figurines in the Iron Age. The essays address terracotta figurines attested in the Southern Levant from the Iron Age through the Persian Period (1200–333 BCE). The volume deals with the iconography, typology, and find context of female, male, animal, and furniture figurines and discusses their production, appearance, and provenance, including their identification and religious functions. While giving priority to figurines originating from Phoenicia, Philistia, Jordan, and Israel/Palestine, the volume explores the influences of Egyptian, Anatolian, Mesopotamian, and Mediterranean (particularly Cypriot) iconography on Levantine pictorial material.
Do you want to engage with Babylonian culture and literature in the original language?The course will introduce you to a fascinating world of gods and demons, heroes and kings.The readings are drawn from myths, letters, law-codes, medical incantations, and other authentic, ancient writings. The language is presented in the Roman alphabet, with an explanation of cuneiform script, and the main features of Assyrian - cognate with Babylonian - are also explained. Learn effortlessly with a new easy-to-read page design and interactive features in this book from Teach Yourself, the No. 1 brand in language learning.
Writing as Material Practice grapples with the issue of writing as a form of material culture in its ancient and more recent manifestations, and in the contexts of production and consumption. Fifteen case studies explore the artefactual nature of writing — the ways in which materials, techniques, colour, scale, orientation and visibility inform the creation of inscribed objects and spaces, as well as structure subsequent engagement, perception and meaning making. Covering a temporal span of some 5000 years, from c.3200 BCE to the present day, and ranging in spatial context from the Americas to the Near East, the chapters in this volume bring a variety of perspectives which contribute to both specific and broader questions of writing materialities. The authors also aim to place past graphical systems in their social contexts so they can be understood in relation to the people who created and attributed meaning to writing and associated symbolic modes through a diverse array of individual and wider social practices.
Since the very beginnings of the digital humanities, Papyrology has been in the vanguard of the application of information technologies to its own scientific purposes, for both theoretical and practical reasons (the strong awareness towards the problems of human memory and the material ways of preserving it; the need to work with a multifarious and overwhelming amount of different data). After more than thirty years of development, we have now at our disposal the most advanced tools to make papyrological studies more and more effective, and even to create a new conception of "papyrology" and a new model of "edition" of the ancient documents. At this turining point, it is important to build an epistemological framework including all the different expressions of Digital Papyrology, to trace a historical sketch setting the background of the contemporary tools, and to provide a clear overview of the current theoretical and technological trends, so that all the possibilities currently available can be exploited following uniform pathways. The volume represents an innovative attempt to deal with such topics, usually relegated into very quick and general treatments within journal articles or papyrological handbooks.