Search results for ""Undena Publications,U.S.""

The silver situla, here edited, is one of the few items of this type which are well known from the royal Assyrian reliefs connected with the ceremony of the tree. The inscription is a dedication of the ob ject by the Urartian king Ispuini (ca. 825-810 B.C.) for his grandson Inuspua who has here the otherwise unknown title of kib?ru (or kibarru). The language is Assyrian and this is the first case of a non monumental inscription of an Urartian king in this language. It is evident that an Assyrian scribal school existed at the Urartian capital Tuspa, at least at the time of Sarduri Ist, father of Ispuini, and now it is also probable that a sort of bilinguialism was present within the leading class of Urartu. The situla is to be dated around 810 B.C.

Read more less

The object of this paper is to present the main results of the Belgian excavations at Tell Abou Danne (Area of the lake of Djabbul) during the seasons 1977 and 1978. The chronology runs from the 7th century BC until the time of Augustus. Through levels I and II of the site, seven successive layers show the evolution of the main cultural features in a rural district of North Syria . Architectural remains, quality wares, lamps, figurines , glass works, metal and stone objects, and coins are taken into consideration. Their study reveals the multiplicity of the cultural influences in the area during the three last quarters of the first millennium BC and the increasing importance of the Mediterranean centers of civilisation.

Read more less

This article presents a preliminary picture of the 1973-1975 excavations of the Tell Mardikh Royal Palace G dating to Early Bronze IVA ( ca. 2400-2250 B.C.). It was in 1975 that some 15,000 cuneiform tablets and fragments were found in the palace, some of them written in a new North- Westem Semitic language. The various sectors of the palace thus far excavated are described and the building is placed within its chronological and historical framework. Ceramic evidence pertaining to the chronology is published here in detail for the first time. The paper (given here in a translation by Dr. Frances Pinnock) was read at the 24th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale at Birmingham in July 1976.

Read more less

Two complementary articles dealing with the Sumerian tale Inanna's descent to the netherworld, with a survey of Near Eastern Venus deities. Buccellati proposes that the Inanna of the story was not only a divine person, but was, in addition, a statue on a ritual journey from southern to northern Babylonia (Kutha). Heimpel rediscovers that she was also, in addition to these two aspects, the planet Venus. One may wonder about this seemingly illogical con cept, but the conclusion appears to be inescapable -that the Sumer ians combined all three aspects in their belief about the same deity in the same tale.

Read more less

The famous programmatic article by Benno Landsberger, "Die Eigenbe grifflichkeit der Babylonischen Welt," was a manifesto which "insisted on the necessity of studying Mesopotamian culture for its own sake, in its own terms, and within its own system of values": as Jacobsen notes it was "under the banner of Eigenbegrifflichkeit thatLandsberger... may be said to have made Assyriology for the first time an autonomous discipline." The article is here made available in a masterly translation by Jacobsen, based on two initial drafts by Foster and Von Siebenthal: it provides an accurate and sensitive reading by another intellectual giant in the field, who was himself a long time personal friend of the author. The introduction, published originally as an obituary, gives a brief and penetrating assessment of Landsberger's life work.

Read more less

The study examines the difference between lexicalized forms of certain predicate-types in Modern Hebrew as manifested through the binyan system of verb- morphology, on the one hand, and their more analytical or "decomposedcounterparts-with specific reference to expressions of Causation, as in hama'ase hexli oti 'the+deed sickened me vs. hama'ase asa oti xole 'the+deed made me sick'; of Inchoative, as in hu hexvir he paled' hu nihya xiver 'he grew pale'; and of Reflexive, as in hu hitgaleax 'he shaved vs. hu gileax et acmo ' he shaved OBJ himself '. It is suggested that the latter forms which may in some instances be attributed to foreign influence , today constitute the more productive devices for expressing such notions in Hebrewand as such they manifest a quite general trend of the language towards increasingly analytic forms of expression. In each case, the formal distinction between morphologi cally lexicalized causatives, inchoatives, and reflexives and their de composed or analytic counterparts is shown to express a semantic contrast in terms of the way the event under discussion is perceived by speakers.

Read more less

The five tablets published here were discovered during the campaigns of 1982 and 1984 in the southern wing of Palace They represent the most recently discovered epigraphic finds from Ebla. The texts consist of accounts of goods under the control of the palace, deliveries of jars of wine, and deliveries of quantities of damp malt. As all of these tablets were recovered in the same general vicinity, it is suggested that the administrative bureau responsible for the handling of and accounting for wine and malt was located in this area. Of particular interest are the texts that recount the deliveries of wine and malt for they are typologically without parallel in the central archive. All five of these documents are datable to the last period of Ebla.

Read more less

F. R. Kraus Die Rolle der Tempel von der dritten Dynastie von Ur bis ersten Dynastie von Babylon," an unpublished manuscript in German published in French in The Journal of World History in anticipation of inclusion in a scientific and cultural history of mankind to be issued by the International Commission for a Scientific and Cultural History of Mankind. The essay discusses in general terms the role of temples in early Mesopotamian society, then turns to more detailed consideration of the respective positions of temples in Babylonian society at the end of the third and during the first half of the second millennium B.C.

Read more less

Details the personal names found on cuneiform tablets from the ancient Mesopotamian city of Nuzi.

Read more less

This manual is designed as a textbook of the Sumerian language, based principally on texts of the Ur III period (21st century BCE). It is self-contained, so that it will be of use to students with or without a teacher. It includes a general description of the Sumerian languageand its writing system, and then a series of graduated lessons. Sumerian is the first attested language known to us. Its oldest texts date to no later than 3000 BCE, and it flourished as a spoken language for 1,000 years. Sumerian literature is the oldest literature in the world, and some of its compositions still have the power to move us today. The Sumerians also left us the first written law codes, the first astronomical texts, and the first medical texts. Alongside Akkadian, Sumerian is of prime importance for reconstructing all aspects of Mesopotamian civilization. The first 27 lessons contained in the book each contain: sign-list and vocabulary; text in cuneiform, either in photograph, autograph, or both; transliteration, transcription and translation; line-by-line analysis; discussion and elaboration of the issues raised by the text. The last three lessons contain extracts from Sumerian literary texts, in transliteration. Throughout, the Sumerian texts have been anchored in their historical and cultural contexts. The readership for the book is firstly those who are interested in the Sumerians and their language and culture, and who may have no training in Akkadian. A second readership is those who wish to learn Sumerian principally because of their interest in Mesopotamian civilization as a whole, and who may already be comfortable in Akkadian and the cuneiform writing system. And thirdly, the book will be useful to those who wish to learn Sumerian because of an interest in comparative Semitic linguistics, and so may want to know something about the influence of Sumerian on Akkadian.

Read more less

In this volume D.B. Weisberg publishes the 54 cuneiform texts, almost all legal texts, from Uruk dated to the Seleucid and Arsacid periods which are preserved in the Tablet Collection of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

Read more less

This is a companion volume to the same author’s A Dictionary of Nigerian Arabic. It lists the approximately 6,000 lexemes with some illustrative sentences alphabetically, from Arabic to English, using the same transcription as the previous work. This dictionary is designed to be of use to specialists in comparative Arabic dialectology and Semitic linguistics as well as to the general linguist interested in Afroasiatic data from a synchronic point of view. In addition, the volume will be of interest to the Africanist dealing with linguistic diffusion and borrowing.

Read more less

The Lagash Umma border dispute is the earliest well - documented interstate conflict known. From about 2500 to 2350 B.C.the Sumerian city - states of Lagash and Umma contested the right to exploit a tract of land on their common border, and their dispute is documented by a series of inscriptions filled with claims and counterclaims, and some times vivid descriptions of battles between the two states. This volume makes available for the first time, complete English translations of all documents relevant to these events. After a brief introduction to early civilization and political organization in Baby lonia, the documents are described in detail. There follows an exposition of the difficulties involved in trying to reconstruct the chronology and the geography of the conflict, and the philological problems that hamper our understanding of the documents. The actual reconstruction of the 150 year struggle is then undertaken by critically examining the sources for each episode. An attempt is made to account for both the high degree of agreement among the individual sources, and the occa sional glaring discrepancies. Documents from outside the corpus of texts relating the border conflict and archeological evidence, are used to set the Lagash-Umma dispute in the broader context of third millennium Mesopotamian history. Special attention is paid to the art and language of ancient historical narratives and the limits they place on the nature of the historical data that can be elicited from a close reading of the inscrip tions. The volume is intended both for specialists and for teachers and students of ancient history in general.

Read more less

An index to the commentary, or "mythology", of the work by George Sandys (1578-1644) entitled Ovid’s Metamorphosis, English’d, Mythologiz’d and Represented in Figures.

Read more less

This cuneifrom workbook gives a course of programmed instruction teaching the 110 most frequently used signs. It teaches the standard Neo-Assyrian sign forms and gives the student practice both in passive and active recognition of the signs. The signs are divided into eight sections, and each section ends with a quiz reviewing all signs presented. The book is designed for home study by students in beginning Akkadian classes and provides a practical introduction to the cuneiform writing system.

Read more less

Khabur Ware and Nuzi Ware are two types of painted pottery in northern Mesopotamia during the second millennium B.C. which have hitherto been treated independently of their respective archaeological contexts on the basis of their painted decoration. Both categories of painted wares were regarded as intrusive and were accordingly attributed to intrusive peoples - namel, the Hurrians. The present study reviews the evidence for Khabur Ware and Nuzi Ware and examines the stratigraphic sequence at a number of key sites in north Mesopotamia and north Syria from the viewpoint of a wider Syro-Mesopotamian frame in order to determine the extent to which these two pottery categories were intrusive and that to which they were indigenous. The resulting modifica tions of the conventional Khabur Ware and Nuzi Ware classifications show that while these two wares are quite distinct from each other in terms of origin, function, date, and distribution, neither category of painted pottery is entirely unprecedented in Mesopotamia and, neither, therefore, can be representative of intrusive peoples. Although the distinction in date and distribution between Khabur Ware and Nuzi Ware may reflect changing spheres of political and commercial contacts, the discrepancy between the function of these two wares precludes the same explanation for their origin. Only Nuzi Ware may be con ceived as a product of political and economic conditions.

Read more less

A typological analysis of 96 objects found during the third season (September-December 1977). These objects, dating to the third and second millennia, include clay figurines, metal pins, weapons and tools, beads , rings and miscellaneous implements. A descriptive catalog provides a detailed entry for each item, with cross references to the Object Typology of the Second Season (TPR 3). Most objects are also illustrated in line drawings and half-tones.

Read more less

A diachronic development in Biblical Hebrew is studied by which the relative subordinating particle becomes also a verb-complement subordinator. It is argued that this development is internally motivated and is not the result of borrowing; and that the development is not the result of simple-minded analogyRather, two natural mediating channels are discussed which, it is felt , are responsible for this syntactic change. It is also suggested that a similar development may have taken place in Aramaic and Akkadian.

Read more less

Seven constraints on consonant sequences in Israeli Hebrew, which are the modern reflexes of older Semitic constraints, are discussed in relation to three levels: (i ) as Morpheme Structure Conditions imposed on the underlying consonantal root morpheme; (ii) as Surface Phonetic Constraints imposed on the word regardless of morphemic content; (iii) as Morpheme Sensitive Surface Constraints, which as the name suggests, are placed on words, but are sensitive to morphemic structure and categorization. The third set of constraints has not been seriously considered in the recent literature, yet at least some of the seven different constraints must be regarded as morpheme-sensitive. The root level is seen to play little or no role in determining these constraints.

Read more less

There are three major dialect groups of Somali: Common (or Northern) Somali, Benaadir Somali, and Central Somali (Rahanwin, Af Maymay etc.). This article presents an outline of the Central Somali spoken in the Bay region of southern Somalia, including the city of Isha Baydhaba (Iscia Baidoa). Aspects of the dialects phonology, morphology , and syntax are described and a sample English Central Somali lexicon is provided. The study reveals that this dialect differs considerably from the other Somali dialects. It is also apparent from the description that this dialect is very similar indeed to that called Jabarti by Leo Reinisch and Maria von Tiling.

Read more less

Legal texts from the imperial archives of Nineveh are a source of foremost importance not only to the study of the legal practices and economic life of the Neo-Assyrian empire, but above all to the prosopography and chronology of the period. Yet their information potential has never been fully utilized, mainly because the texts can only be consulted through two outdated publications, C.H.W. Johns's Assyrian Deeds and Documents and A. Ungnad's and J.Kohler's Asyrische Rechtsurkunden. In anticipation of a re-edition of the texts, whose completion still lies years ahead, the present article offers collations to about 300 texts of the corpus providing, besides numerous improvements to the copies of Johns, also a touchstone for earlier collations by Ungnad and others.

Read more less

Essays on the history of geography by Emmanuel de Martonne, Paul Claval, Philippe Pinchemel, Hermann Wagner, Alfred Hettner, Hanno Beck.

Read more less

Contributions by W. Montgomery Watt, Alford T. Welch, William A. Graham, George Makdisi, Michael E. Marmura, Annemarie Schimmel and David Kerr.

Read more less

This volume describes the 825 figurines and model vehicles that were discovered during the 1965 and 1967 seasins of excavations at Tell Selenkahiye and Wreyde in Syria.

Read more less

In the latter fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C., the Middle Assyrian state under went a major expansion which raised it to the stature of a great power in the Near East. The efforts made to rule the newly acquired territories are the subject of this paper. The first part is an edition of five previously unpublished Middle Assyrian documents from the Yale Babylonian Collection, which bear on the issue of provincial government. Although not an archive, all may be classified as economic and administrative (they include an agricultural loan and records of disbursement), all date apparently from the thirteenth century, and all come from the provincial site of Tell Amuda, or Kulishinas as it seems to have been called in this period. The texts thus link up, at least in date and provenience , with several of those published by M.-J. Aynard , J.-M. Durand , and P. Amiet in Assur 3/1 (July, 1980). With these texts as a point of departure, the paper goes on to collect the other evi dence for the system of provincial governance in Middle Assyria during the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries.The stages of growth of that system are charted, and the nature of its various territorial units and the personnel who staffed them is analyzed in detail. The point is made that by the thirteenth century, at least, the provincial officials formed a clear class of royal dependents. Any effort to see in them testimony for an oligarchic control of the state by a small group of great families is unwarranted.

Read more less

A recording system based on tokens, spread throughout the Near East from the early Neolithic on, is proposed as a demonstrable antecedent of the cuneiform writing system. Consisting of a rich and differentiated repertory of shapes and markings, this token system is more complex than a simple system of un-differentiated counters. A first attempt at an inventory of the most representative shapes of tokens from throughout the Near East is provided, including all the documentation presently available to me. On this basis a preliminary comparison is made with signs found on the earliest tablets, and an interpretation is suggested for the identification of some of the existing tokens . Finally, a developmental scheme is proposed to explain the transition from tokens and bullae as prototypes of writing to a full-fledged writing system of impressed and incised signs.

Read more less

This article deals with the West Semitic nomadic tribe of the Rabbeans who at the time of the Mart archives belonged to the Benjaminite con federation and controlled one of the mixed urbantribal states on the upper Middle Euphrates. It traces the history of the tribe to the end of the Late Bronze and examins its role in the struggle of the contem poraneous great powers. Then, after a long historical, it shows the descendants of the Rabbeans re-emerge, under the same name, in the same area, and in a very similar political role, during the struggle for Syria in the first century B.C.

Read more less

The primary objectives of this research were to (1) establish an overall orientation and framework for future analysis of this type at Terga and (2) to determine on a preliminary basis the relationship of ceramics and soils of two sites in the Near East: ancient Terga (modern Ashara in Syria) and Dilbat (modern Tell Deylem in Iraq). The long-term objective of this sourcing was to contribute data toward the reconstruction of social, political and economic trends. A truly interdisciplinary effort was required , as several universities and analytical techniques were utilized-atomic absorption, optical emission, thin section, botanical and computer analyses. A general attempt was made to suggest and formulate a continuum of research standards, from the original field collection of samples to the actual laboratory analysis; this standardization would establish an overall climate of reproducibility and credibility. The most important substantive results are found in the areas of ceramic composition, ceramic clay / (soil) relationships, atomic absorption and computer refinement for archaeological analysis.

Read more less

This article presents an outline of procedures followed by the ancient Hittite woman in dealing with the processes of pregnancy and birth. These ritual texts with notes and comments include translations of seven relevant incantations dealing with pregnancy, delivery, and ceremonies following parturition. Magico religious, medical, festal observances relating to the birth cycle are included. Philological details are kept to a minimum for the sake of the non-specialist while scholars in the field will find ample documentation in the author's dissertation.

Read more less

A comparative examination of two recent books on ancient trade (Trade in the Ancient Near East, ed. J. D. Hawkins, 1977 and Ancient Civilizations and Trade, eds. J. A. Sabloff and C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky 1975) provides the opportunity to juxtapose bodies of data and theory in the interpretation of Mesopotamian economic systems. It is seen that the study of trade necessarily entails an appreciation of the socio economic consequences of movement of goods and must include an assessment not only of the quality of traded materials but also of the volume of the trade. Among the sections of the essay are reviews of Mesopotamian trade in the third millennium and Old Assyrian period, an overview of prehistoric tradeand a concluding evaluation on the prospects for explaining trade in ancient Western Asia.

Read more less