Palaeography Books

Book SynopsisIn Voices on Birchbark Jos Schaeken explores the major role that writing on birchbark – an ephemeral, even ‘throw-away’ form of correspondence and administration – played in the vibrant medieval merchant city of Novgorod and other cities in the Russian Northwest. Birchbark literacy was crucial to the organization of Novgorodian society; it was integrated into a huge variety of activities and had a broad social basis; it was used extensively by the laity, by women as well as men, by villagers as well as landlords. Voices on Birchbark is the first book-length study of this unique corpus in English. By examining a representative selection of birchbark texts, Jos Schaeken presents fascinating vignettes of daily medieval life and a holistic picture of the pragmatics of communication in pre-modern societies.Trade Review"Jos Schaeken has produced a subtle, impressively thorough (despite its brevity) and up-to-date guide to an important, intriguing and deceptively complex set of sources. His book is a very welcome addition to the lamentably limited English-language bibliography of the subject." -Simon Franklin, Clare College, University of Cambridge in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics, 2019 "Le livre de J. Schaeken est une belle et multifacette représentation de tout le corpus des documents sur écorce de bouleau." -Timofey V. Guimon in Cahiers de civilisation Médiévale, 2019

Read more less

Book SynopsisWinner of the 2020 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies In her groundbreaking investigation from the perspective of the aesthetics of religion, Isabel Laack explores the religion and art of writing of the pre-Hispanic Aztecs of Mexico. Inspired by postcolonial approaches, she reveals Eurocentric biases in academic representations of Aztec cosmovision, ontology, epistemology, ritual, aesthetics, and the writing system to provide a powerful interpretation of the Nahua sense of reality. Laack transcends the concept of “sacred scripture” traditionally employed in religions studies in order to reconstruct the Indigenous semiotic theory and to reveal how Aztec pictography can express complex aspects of embodied meaning. Her study offers an innovative approach to nonphonographic semiotic systems, as created in many world cultures, and expands our understanding of human recorded visual communication. This book will be essential reading for scholars and readers interested in the history of religions, Mesoamerican studies, and the ancient civilizations of the Americas. "This excellent book, written with intellectual courage and critical self-awareness, is a brilliant, multilayered thought experiment into the images and stories that made up the Nahua sense of reality as woven into their sensational ritual performances and colorful symbolic writing system." - Davíd Carrasco, Harvard UniversityTrade ReviewIsabel Laack’s Aztec Religion and Art of Writing makes an important departure from the way aesthetics, semiotics, and studies of religion have been applied to our understanding of Aztec civilization and culture. Furthermore, by relocating the epicenter of scholarly “gaze,” to religion and regions beyond Christianity and Anglo-American or European contexts, Laack offers an innovative postcolonial aesthetic approach to religion. Laack’s bold methodological departure from her own graduate training provides encouragement for scholars of all stages to chart similar pathways for themselves. - Jury of the AAR 2020 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies.Table of ContentsContents Foreword Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Introduction  1 Introducing the Subject  2 Indicating Sociopolitical Relevance  3 Realizing the Aesthetics of Religion  4 Outlining the Chapters 1 Methodology  1 Doing Research in a Postcolonial World  2 Writing History  3 Clarifying Perspectives and Objectives  4 Summary 2 Living in Cultural Diversity  1 Drawing on History  2 Living in the Central Highlands  3 Living in Religious Diversity  4 Conclusion: Diversity within the Nahua Tradition 3 Living in Relation: Being Human in Tenochtitlan  1 How the World Came to Be  2 How the Human World Came to Be  3 How the Cosmic Dynamics Unfold  4 Living in Cosmic Relations  5 Living in Social Relations  6 Living Properly—Living in Balance 4 A World in Motion: Nahua Ontology  1 Aztec Notions of “Divinity”  2 The Nature of Teotl  3 Teotl’s Realization: Nahualli and the Layers of Reality  4 A World in Motion: The Fifth Era  5 The Problem of Ephemerality: What Is Really Real? 5 Understanding a World in Motion: Nahua Epistemology  1 Epistemology  2 Knowledge Experts: Wise (Wo)Men and Scribes  2 People with Special Insights  3 The Inspiration of Knowledge and Its Expression 6 Interacting with a World in Motion: Nahua Pragmatism and Aesthetics  1 Human Agency: Seeking Balance  2 Human Duties  3 Interacting with Rituals  4 Involving the Senses and Aesthetic Media  5 The Concept of the Teixiptla 7 Expressing Reality in Language: Nahua Linguistic Theory  1 Nahua Oral Tradition  2 Reconstructing Nahua Songs  3 Thinking in Nahuatl  4 Nahua Imagery  5 The Relationship between the Spoken Sign and Reality in Nahuatl  6 Nahua Imagery and the Problem of Rationality 8 Materializing Reality in Writing: Nahua Pictography  1 The History of Writing Systems in Mesoamerica  2 The Writing System of the Nahuas  3 Social Text Practice  4 Books and Authors  5 Nahua Culture between Orality and Literacy 9 Understanding Pictography: Interpreting Nahua Semiotics  1 The History of Evaluating Aztec Writing  2 Different Kinds of Meaning and Knowledge  3 Seeing Reality: Nahua Semiotic Theory  4 Interpreting Nahua Pictography 10 Interpretative Results: Nahua Religion, Scripture, and Sense of Reality  1 From Religion to Being-in-the-World  2 From Scripture to Semiotics  3 Interrelationships: Semiotic Theory and Embodied Meaning Conclusion References Index Plates

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis volume collects 33 papers that were presented at the international conference held at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in November 2015 to celebrate the centenary of Bedřich Hrozný’s identification of Hittite as an Indo-European language. Contributions are grouped into three sections, “Hrozný and His Discoveries,” “Hittite and Indo-European,” and “The Hittites and Their Neighbors,” and span the full range of Hittite studies and related disciplines, from Anatolian and Indo-European linguistics and cuneiform philology to Ancient Near Eastern archaeology, history, and religion. The authors hail from 15 countries and include leading figures as well as emerging scholars in the fields of Hittitology, Indo-European, and Ancient Near Eastern studies.Table of ContentsAbbreviations Introduction Part 1: Hrozný and His Discoveries 1 Hrozný’s Excavations at Kültepe and the Resurrection of a Bronze Age Palace  Gojko Barjamovic 2 Hrozný’s Excavations, 1924–1925: Sheikh Sa’ad, Tell Erfad  Jan Bouzek 3 Hrozný and the Decipherment of Hieroglyphic Luwian  J.D. Hawkins 4 Bedřich Hrozný and the Aegean Writing Systems: An Early Decipherment Attempt  Artemis Karnava 5 A Fruitful Collaboration between E. Sellin and B. Hrozný during his Viennese Years: The Cuneiform Texts from Tell Taanach and Their Impact on Syro-Levantine Studies  Regine Pruzsinszky Part 2: Hittite and Indo-European 6 Consonant Clusters, Defective Notation of Vowels and Syllable Structure in Caromemphite  Ignasi-Xavier Adiego 7 Tagging and Searching the Hittite Corpus  Dita Frantíková 8 The Phonetics and Phonology of the Hittite Dental Stops  Alwin Kloekhorst 9 Über die hethitische 3. Sg. Präsens auf -ia-Iz-zi  Martin Joachim Kümmel 10 The Word for Wine in Anatolian, Greek, Armenian, Italic, Etruscan, Semitic and Its Indo-European Origin  Reiner Lipp 11 Satzanfänge im Hethitischen  Rosemarie Lühr 12 Hittite Historical Phonology after 100 Years (and after 20 Years)  H. Craig Melchert 13 MUNUS/fduttarii̯ata/i- and Some Other Indo-European Maidens  Veronika Milanova 14 One Century of Heteroclitic Inflection  Georges-Jean Pinault 15 From Experiential Contact to Abstract Thought: Reflections on Some Hittite Outcomes of PIE *steh2- ‘to stand’ and *men- ‘to think’  Marianna Pozza 16 Hittite Syntax 100 Years Later: The Case of Hittite Indefinite Pronouns  Andrei V. Sideltsev 17 Das unerwartete in der altassyrischen Nebenüberlieferung hethitischer Wörter  Zsolt Simon 18 The Personal Deictic Function of Hittite kāša, kāšma and kāšat(t)a: Further Evidence from the Texts  Charles W. Steitler 19 Lycian Erimñnuha  Jan Tavernier 20 The Indo-European Feminine, the Neuter, and the Diagnostic Value of the τὰ ζῷα τρέχει rule in Greek and Anatolian  Annette Teffeteller 21 Sidetisch – Ein Update zu Schrift und Sprache  Christian Zinko and Michaela Zinko Part 3: The Hittites and Their Neighbors 22 The LÚ.MEŠ SAG and Their Rise to Prominence  Tayfun Bilgin 23 Virginity in Hittite Ritual  Billie Jean Collins 24 Venus in Furs: Sappho fr. 101 Voigt between East and West  Alexander Dale 25 A Problem of Meaning: Variations in Hittite Landscape as Narrated in the Sun-god’s mugawar (CTH 323)  Romina Della Casa 26 „Fehler“ und Fehlschreibungen in hethitischen Texten  Susanne Görke 27 Personennamen der hethitischen Großreichszeit als Quellen religiöser Verhältnisse  Manfred Hutter 28 Die Gottheit Nikarawa in Karkamiš  Sylvia Hutter-Braunsar 29 From Nerik to Emar  Patrick M. Michel 30 The Last Foothold of Arzawa: The Problem of the Location of Puranda and Mount Arinnanda Revisited  Rostislav Oreshko 31 Phrygia and the Near East  Maya Vassileva 32 The Disappearance of Telipinu in the Context of Indo-European Myth  Roger D. Woodard 33 Foreign Medical Knowledge in Ḫattuša: The Transmission and Reception of Mesopotamian Therapeutic Texts in the Hittite World  Valeria Zubieta Lupo Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn Mittani Palaeography, Zenobia Homan analyses cuneiform writing from the Late Bronze Age Mittani state, which was situated in the region between modern Aleppo, Erbil and Diyarbakır. The ancient communication network reveals a story of local scribal tradition blended with regional adaptation and international political change, reflecting the ways in which written knowledge travelled within the cuneiform culture of the Middle East. Mittani signs, their forms, and variants, are described and defined in detail utilising a large digital database and discussed in relation to other regional corpora (Assyro-Mittanian, Middle Assyrian, Nuzi and Tigunanum among others). The collected data indicate that Mittanian was comparatively standardised – an innovation for the period – signifying the existence of a centralised system of scribal training.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe introduction of writing enables new forms of literature, but these can be invisible in works that survive as manuscripts. Through looking at inscriptions of poetry on garbage and as graffiti, we can glimpse how literature spread along with writing. This study uses these lesser-studied sources, including inscriptions on pottery, architecture, and especially wooden tablets known as mokkan, to uncover how poetry, and literature more broadly, was used, shared and thrown away in early Japan. Through looking at these disposable and informal sources, we explore the development of early Japanese literature, and even propose parallels to similar developments in other societies across space and time.

Read more less

Book SynopsisWinner of the 2020 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies In her groundbreaking investigation from the perspective of the aesthetics of religion, Isabel Laack explores the religion and art of writing of the pre-Hispanic Aztecs of Mexico. Inspired by postcolonial approaches, she reveals Eurocentric biases in academic representations of Aztec cosmovision, ontology, epistemology, ritual, aesthetics, and the writing system to provide a powerful interpretation of the Nahua sense of reality. Laack transcends the concept of “sacred scripture” traditionally employed in religions studies in order to reconstruct the Indigenous semiotic theory and to reveal how Aztec pictography can express complex aspects of embodied meaning. Her study offers an innovative approach to nonphonographic semiotic systems, as created in many world cultures, and expands our understanding of human recorded visual communication. This book will be essential reading for scholars and readers interested in the history of religions, Mesoamerican studies, and the ancient civilizations of the Americas. "This excellent book, written with intellectual courage and critical self-awareness, is a brilliant, multilayered thought experiment into the images and stories that made up the Nahua sense of reality as woven into their sensational ritual performances and colorful symbolic writing system." - Davíd Carrasco, Harvard UniversityTrade ReviewIsabel Laack’s Aztec Religion and Art of Writing makes an important departure from the way aesthetics, semiotics, and studies of religion have been applied to our understanding of Aztec civilization and culture. Furthermore, by relocating the epicenter of scholarly “gaze,” to religion and regions beyond Christianity and Anglo-American or European contexts, Laack offers an innovative postcolonial aesthetic approach to religion. Laack’s bold methodological departure from her own graduate training provides encouragement for scholars of all stages to chart similar pathways for themselves. - Jury of the AAR 2020 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies.Table of ContentsContents Foreword Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Introduction  1 Introducing the Subject  2 Indicating Sociopolitical Relevance  3 Realizing the Aesthetics of Religion  4 Outlining the Chapters 1 Methodology  1 Doing Research in a Postcolonial World  2 Writing History  3 Clarifying Perspectives and Objectives  4 Summary 2 Living in Cultural Diversity  1 Drawing on History  2 Living in the Central Highlands  3 Living in Religious Diversity  4 Conclusion: Diversity within the Nahua Tradition 3 Living in Relation: Being Human in Tenochtitlan  1 How the World Came to Be  2 How the Human World Came to Be  3 How the Cosmic Dynamics Unfold  4 Living in Cosmic Relations  5 Living in Social Relations  6 Living Properly—Living in Balance 4 A World in Motion: Nahua Ontology  1 Aztec Notions of “Divinity”  2 The Nature of Teotl  3 Teotl’s Realization: Nahualli and the Layers of Reality  4 A World in Motion: The Fifth Era  5 The Problem of Ephemerality: What Is Really Real? 5 Understanding a World in Motion: Nahua Epistemology  1 Epistemology  2 Knowledge Experts: Wise (Wo)Men and Scribes  2 People with Special Insights  3 The Inspiration of Knowledge and Its Expression 6 Interacting with a World in Motion: Nahua Pragmatism and Aesthetics  1 Human Agency: Seeking Balance  2 Human Duties  3 Interacting with Rituals  4 Involving the Senses and Aesthetic Media  5 The Concept of the Teixiptla 7 Expressing Reality in Language: Nahua Linguistic Theory  1 Nahua Oral Tradition  2 Reconstructing Nahua Songs  3 Thinking in Nahuatl  4 Nahua Imagery  5 The Relationship between the Spoken Sign and Reality in Nahuatl  6 Nahua Imagery and the Problem of Rationality 8 Materializing Reality in Writing: Nahua Pictography  1 The History of Writing Systems in Mesoamerica  2 The Writing System of the Nahuas  3 Social Text Practice  4 Books and Authors  5 Nahua Culture between Orality and Literacy 9 Understanding Pictography: Interpreting Nahua Semiotics  1 The History of Evaluating Aztec Writing  2 Different Kinds of Meaning and Knowledge  3 Seeing Reality: Nahua Semiotic Theory  4 Interpreting Nahua Pictography 10 Interpretative Results: Nahua Religion, Scripture, and Sense of Reality  1 From Religion to Being-in-the-World  2 From Scripture to Semiotics  3 Interrelationships: Semiotic Theory and Embodied Meaning Conclusion References Index Plates

Read more less

Book SynopsisHow is it possible to write down the Japanese language exclusively in Chinese characters? And how are we then able to determine the language behind the veil of the Chinese script as Japanese? The history of writing in Japan presents us with a fascinating variety of writing styles ranging from phonography to morphography and all shades in between. In Japanese Morphography: Deconstructing hentai kanbun, Gordian Schreiber shows that texts traditionally labelled as “hentai kanbun” or “variant Chinese” are, in fact, morphographically written Japanese texts instead and not just the result of an underdeveloped skill in Chinese. The study fosters our understanding of writing system typology beyond phonographic writing.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis work focuses the social context of writing in ancient Western Arabia in the oasis of ancient Dadan, modern-day al-ʿUlā in the northwest of the Arabian Peninsula between the sixth to first centuries BC. It offers a description and analysis of the language of the inscriptions and the variation attested within them. It is the first work to perform a systematic study of the linguistic variation of the Dadanitic inscriptions. It combines a thorough description of the language of the inscriptions with a statistical analysis of the distribution of variation across different textual genres and manners of inscribing. By considering correlations between language-internal and extralinguistic features this analysis aims to take a more holistic approach to the epigraphic object. Through this approach an image of a rich writing culture emerges, in which we can see innovation as well as the deliberate use of archaic linguistic features in more formal text types.Table of ContentsList of Figures, Maps and Tables Sigla and Abbreviations Acknowledgements Introduction  1 Outline of the Present Work  2 The Corpus  3 A Holistic Approach to the Epigraphic Object  4 Scribal School and Variation 1 The Oasis of Dadan in Space and Time  1 The Dadanite and Liḥyanite Kingdoms  2 Philological Arguments  3 Minaean Presence at Dadan  4 Paleography  5 Dadan in Other Corpora  6 Archaeological Evidence  7 Summary of the Dating Evidence 2 Script and Manners of Inscribing  1 Glyphs and Their Variant Forms  2 Script Styles  3 Dadanitic Alphabetic Text  4 Summary: Varying Styles, Varying Forms 3 Genres and Compositional Formulae  1 Superscriptio  2 Narratio  3 Invocatio  4 Graffiti  5 Summary 4 Orthography and Phonology  1 Word Dividers  2 Matres lectionis  3 Triphthongs  4 Final Short Vowels  5 Diphthongs  6 Sound Changes 5 Verbal Morphology  1 Suffix Conjugation  2 Prefix Conjugation  3 Derived Stems  4 Participles 6 Nominal and Pronominal Morphology  1 Gender  2 Number  3 Noun Formation  4 Demonstrative Pronoun  5 Relative Pronoun  6 hmḏ  7 mh  8 mn  9 Personal Pronouns  10 Prepositions  11 Numerals  12 Adverbs  13 Particles  14 Conjunctions 7 A Quantitative Approach to Variation  1 Methodology: Statistics  2 The Data and Methodology 8 Analysis  1 Text Internal Variants  2 Register Indicators  3 Important Non-significant Co-occurrences  4 Discussion  5 Summary Conclusions  1 Descriptive and Grammar Chapters  2 Chapters Analyzing Variation  3 Variation and Literacy  4 Future Directions  5 Summary Glossary Bibliography Index of Inscriptions

Read more less

Book SynopsisDer vorliegende Band dokumentiert das vom Konstanzer Graduiertenkolleg Theorie der Literatur im Oktober 1992 an der Universität Konstanz veranstaltete Symposium Zeichen zwischen Klartext und Arabeske, an dem SpezialistInnen aus verschiedenen kulturwissenschaftlichen Disziplinen teilnahmen. Klartext und Arabeske stecken das Feld ab für die zu problematisierenden Zeichenbegriffe. Auf welch unterschiedliche Weisen unvereinbare Aufzeichnungsmodelle gegeneinander-geführt werden und miteinander konkurrieren, wird anhand verschiedener Objektbereiche und Methoden dargestellt: Kombinatorische Textgenerierung, Kryptographie, Kalligraphie, Bild-Schrift-Relationen, Arabeskisierung des Textes im strukturellen und semantischen Bereich, Rematerialisierung und Energetisierung von Zeichen. Zwei prinzipiell zu unterscheidende Ausrichtungen bestimmen die Konzeption des Bandes. Die ersten drei Teile, Kombinatorik - Alphabet, Schrift - Bild und Kryptographie - Latenz sind unter dem Aspekt der Doppeltextualität und Mehrfachkodierung zum ersten Teil des Bandes zusammenzufassen. In den Teilen 4 und 5, Ornament - Zeichen und Zeichen-Körper - Energetik, dagegen steht in der Zusammenführung unterschiedlicher Codes darüberhinaus der Begriff des Zeichens generell auf dem Spiel. Im Namen des Ornamentbegriffs Arabeske werden Remotivierungs- und Renaturalisierungsstrategien im Hinblick auf eine arabeske Semantik verfolgt, die Semiosen aller Art immer wieder infrage stellt und energetisch 'überschießt'. Diese globale Einteilung in zwei Blöcke versteht sich als systematische Gewichtung, wobei die gegenseitige Abhängigkeit der Teile untereinander immer mitreflektiert wird.

Read more less