David Weisberg became fascinated by Assyriology as an
undergraduate at Columbia University. Already endowed with a strong
background in Hebraica, he soon came to know that he needed the
deeper ...immersion of a graduate program, and he enrolled at Yale to
pursue it. David's interests soon focused on the Chaldean Dynasty
of Nebuchadnezzar and the Achaemenid Dynasty of Cyrus the Great.
Weisberg's thesis succeeded in illuminating the wider significance
of some previously unpublished cuneiform texts from this period?as
well as earning him the doctorate. The thesis appeared in the
recently established Yale Near Eastern Researches (1967) under the
somewhat daunting title Guild Structure and Political
Allegiance in Early Achaemenid Mesopotamia , and David's career
was launched.
Weisberg's oeuvre, as exemplified by the nearly three dozen
essays conveniently assembled in this volume, attest both to his
prodigious industriousness and to the loss that the field of
Assyriology has suffered in his untimely demise. As is clear from
the Table of Contents, he continued to make major contributions to
the study of the Neo-Babylonian period (especially regarding
political and military history and the doings of ancient royals)
but he also offered seminal insights in other areas, including
Masoretic studies, rabbinics, social and economic life of the
ancient Near East, as well as the interface between modern culture
and study of the ancient world.
-Based on W. W. Hallo's "Introduction"
Die zeitliche Dimension von Kulturgeschichte wurde lange Zeit durch die Schilderungen der Bibel, ergänzt um die Darstellung klassischer Autoren bestimmt. Mit dem frühneuzeitlichen Aufkommen der ...Naturwissenschaften bildete sich allmählich ein alternatives Paradigma heraus, das religiöse Gewissheiten in Frage stellte und geistige und geistliche Autoritäten herausforderte. Im Rahmen dieser weltanschaulichen Auseinandersetzung erhofften sich beide Seiten Unterstützung durch die Erkenntnisse der sich zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts ausbildenden Altertumswissenschaften. Ihre Vertreter waren sowohl durch die Verfahren des kritischen Quellenstudiums geprägt wie auch durch die Anwendung naturwissenschaftlicher Untersuchungsmethoden. Dabei verlief die Entwicklung von einer "biblischen Chronologie" hin zu naturwissenschaftlich und durch historische Belege gesicherten Geschichtsschreibung keineswegs linear und einseitig. Gerade aufgrund der doppelten Prägung früher Altertumswissenschaftler durch religiöse Weltbilder und die Schulung in (natur-)wissenschaftlichem Denken, entstanden immer neue Vorstellungen und Konzepte über das Alter menschlicher Kultur. Der Band setzt sich in mehreren wissenschaftshistorischen Fallstudien mit diesen Entwicklungen auseinander.
The dataset1 consists of 3D scans of one cuneiform tablet from Haft Tappeh Iran and one cuneiform tablet of the Hilprecht Collection as well as 3D annotations on these 3D meshes, including metadata. ...The 3D annotations were created with the annotation software Annotorious2 on 2D renderings and reprojected to the original 3D model. The respective 2D renderings and annotations in 2D are also part of this data publication. The annotations might be used in machine learning tasks for character recognition, linguistic studies, or visualization in Assyriology. We publish these data in different formats and give guidance on how to use them in different usage scenarios and with several software applications. The data serve as the basis for a detailed description, reasoning, and elaboration of a recommendation for the state-of-the-art handling of 3D data in cuneiform research. The data is stored as an archive on Zenodo and may serve as an example for replication by similar 3D scanning. Keywords: Assyriology, 3D data, cuneiform studies, 3D annotation, character recognition
Based on contrasting characterization and narrative logic between the central Huwawa episode and the remaining material for the earliest Akkadian Gilgamesh, this book challenges the accepted notion ...that the famous epic was composed without recourse to a previous Akkadian narrative.
In the week between July 21 and 25, 2014, the University of
Warsaw hosted more than three hundred Assyriologists from all over
the world. In the course of five days, nearly 150 papers were read
in ...three (and sometimes four) parallel sessions. Many of them were
delivered within the framework of nine thematic workshops. The
publication of most of these panels is underway, in separate
volumes. As is usually the case, the academic sessions were
accompanied by many opportunities for social interaction among the
participants, and there was time to enjoy the historical and
cultural benefits of Warsaw. Special honor was accorded to two
American Assyriologists whose origins can be traced to Warsaw,
Piotr Michalowski and Piotr Steinkeller, and a special session to
recognize their contributions to the study of ancient Mesopotamia
was organized.
In this book are presented papers on the main theme of the
meeting, "Fortune and Misfortune in the Ancient Near East." The 31
essays are organized into 5 sections: (1) plenary presenations on
"What Is Fortune? What Is Misfortune?"; (2) humanity and
fortune/misfortune and luck, with discussion of specific examples;
(3) additional papers on definitions of fortune and misfortune; (4)
the effects on city and state; and (5) God and temple.
The present volume collects eighteen essays exploring the
history of ancient Near Eastern studies. Combining diverse
approaches-synthetic and analytic, diachronic and
transnational-this collection ...offers critical reflections on the
who, why, and how of this cluster of fields. How have political
contexts determined the conduct of research? How do academic
agendas reflect larger social, economic, and cultural interests?
How have schools of thought and intellectual traditions configured,
and sometimes predetermined, the study of the ancient Near East?
Contributions treating research during the Nazi and fascist periods
examine the interpenetration of academic work with politics, while
contributions dealing with specific national contexts disclose
fresh perspectives on individual scholars as well as the conditions
and institutions in which they worked. Particular attention is
given to scholarship in countries such as Turkey, Portugal, Iran,
China, and Spain, which have hitherto been marginal to
historiographic accounts of ancient Near Eastern studies.
The “Mesopotamian Ancient Place-names Almanac” (MAPA) focuses on the southern Mesopotamian city of Uruk and its extensive hinterland (Biblical Erech, modern Warka), one of the world’s first ...mega-cities. Uruk possesses some of the earliest attestations of the cuneiform writing system, and boasts of being the royal seat of the legendary king Gilgamesh. MAPA is a first step in integrating textual sources with remote sensing data for reconstructing the social and physical geography of Mesopotamia in the Age of Empires. The dataset presented here is the recent edition of the gazetteer (v1.0) follows linked open data (LOD) protocols, and draws close to 400 placenames from legal, economic, and administrative texts mostly from the first millennium BCE rich archives of Uruk; namely, those produced under the Assyrian, Babylonian and Achaemenid empires.
PDF
