Akkadian

This article challenges the common tendency in modern research to treat impurity as a religious phenomenon divorced from mundane concerns. Employing the cross-cultural psychological notion of “contagion,” this investigation examines the usage of terms for pollution and purity in Hittite and Akkadian as they relate to distinct domains of human experience, specifically: uncleanness, infection and transgression. Special attention is given to the use of these terms in reference to infectious disease. This analysis demonstrates the real-world experiential basis for notions of impurity and also provides a new perspective to shed light on the peculiarities of each culture (e.g. the absence of an Akkadian term for “pollution”). The article concludes with a detailed excurses on the etymology of Akkadian musukku and its relation to Sumerian (m)uzug.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/716031

Babylonian hermeneutics has been the subject of several studies in recent years that have showed that speculative thought exploited the potentiality of the cuneiform system through analogical reasoning in order to find and create new meanings according to phonetic, semantic and graphic similarities. Analogical hermeneutics was prompted by the polysemic and homophonic nature of cuneiform writing and was intended as an inquiry into the cuneiform system itself. Analogical reasoning is also well known in ancient Greece particularly in Heraclitus producing semantic proliferation and ambiguity. A comparison between Mesopotamian and Greek sources shows that Heraclitus’ fragments share with cuneiform scholarship a similar epistemic reasoning based on analogy. The present contribution aims at setting the Babylonian epistemological system in light of Heraclitus' philosophy.

Eski Mezopotamya'daki inanışa göre tanrılar insanlar hakkındaki düşüncelerini çeşitli
yollardan mesajlar göndererek bildiriyorlardı. Gök olayları tanrı mesajlarını
okumak için birer işaret olarak görülerek incelenip yorumlanmış ve geleceğe dair
astrolojik kehanetlerde bulunulmuştur. Kehanetlere göre, eğer gökyüzünde olumlu
bir işaret görülmüş ise, yeryüzünde de olumlu bir gelişme meydana gelecektir. Tam
tersine gökyüzünde görülen olumsuz bir işaret de yeryüzünde meydana gelecek
olumsuz olayların bir habercisidir. Kehanetlerden anlaşıldığına göre gök cisimlerinin
her birisinin yeryüzüne etkileri farklıdır. Bununla birlikte mana bakımından
olumlu veya olumsuz göksel fenomenlerin birbirleri ile kombinasyonları belirli bir
mantık çerçevesinde yorumlanmıştır. Gökte meydana gelen değişken durumlar kehanetlere
konu olmuştur. Bu değişkenlerden bazıları: Gök cisimlerinin parlak veya
sönük olmaları, renkleri, birbirlerine yaklaşıp uzaklaşmaları, Ay ve güneş tutulmaları
ile fırtına gibi meteorolojik olaylardır. M.Ö. I. Binyıl ortalarına kadar astrolojik
kehanetler krallar ve ülke için iken, bu devirden sonra sıradan kişiler için de astrolojik
kehanetlerde bulunulmuştur. Astrologlar saraya bağlı olarak görev yapmışlar,
saray tarafından maddi olarak desteklenip saygı görmüşlerdir.
Anahtar kelimeler: Astroloji, Enuma Anu Enlil,, Yıldız falı.

This article focuses on the spellings of the 3 sg. pres. form of Gtn-stem of the verb apālu(m) «to pay» in one of the legal formulas from the Neo-Babylonian texts. This form in some documents from the archives of the city of Ur has a spelling with an unusual realization of Iʔ that when in contact with -t- of the infix gives sometimes the spelling of imtanappal.

In two different treatments of the Nuzi contract HSS V 67, E. A. Speiser provided two different transliterations and translations of a key phrase without giving his reasons for the revision. It turns out that the text in question is damaged, rendering one particular cuneiform sign nearly unreadable. The significance of Speiser’s revision for biblical studies is that, depending on which reading is taken, this text provides some legal background either for the concern that a full wife might send away the children of a secondary wife (as in Genesis 21) or for the phenomenon of surrogate motherhood (i. e. the identification of the child of a secondary wife as in some way the child of the full wife; see Genesis 16 and 30). Though some biblical scholars have noted Speiser’s two translations, no one so far has engaged in a technical discussion of the primary text in order to understand the revision. Rather, scholars have sometimes simply chosen the reading that fits better with their purposes (usually Speiser’s earlier reading). This article examines the original cuneiform text of HSS V 67 in order to ascertain, using orthographical and linguistic data, which of Speiser’s two readings is the more likely. Speiser’s revised reading proves to be the correct one, meaning that HSS V 67 does not provide a background legal concern that a full wife might send away the sons of a secondary wife (e. g. Genesis 21).

The chief aim of this essay is to posit a well-known Mesopotamian royal and divine epithet, ušumgallu "great dragon," as the source behind Ezekiel's enigmatic description of Pharaoh in 29.3, hattannīn haggādôl, "the great dragon." This relationship sheds new light and meaning on an old problem: why does Ezekiel refer to Pharaoh as a dragon? Rather than viewing this prophetic expression as a pejorative, the cognate evidence argues for the converse by rooting it in an enduring tradition of regal titles. Replicating Akkadian ušumgallu (Sumerian UŠUM.GAL) as efficiently as possible and drawing upon Israelite cosmological history (viz. Gen 1.21a), Ezekiel feigned including Pharaoh within a venerable, long line of Mesopotamian kings and deities to receive this title. Instead, and as is characteristic of Ezekiel's rhetoric, he upended the putative associations of the "great dragon," thereby exposing its true subordinate position under the hegemony of YHWH

The paper offers an edition of an Old Babylonian Gilgamesh tablet from the Schøyen Collection (OB Schøyen2 in the edition by A.R. George). The text has been extensively commented upon. New interpretations are proposed for ll. 30, 37, 40, 46, 55.

This thesis explores a specific form of representation from the Syrian Bronze Age: aniconic standing-stones, lacking inscriptions or decorations. These have been mainly studied from the point of view of texts which mention cult activity associated with them, but there has been heretofore no integrated analysis of archaeological finds, analysing architecture and associated material culture in comparison to texts. I will interpret litholatry (the cult of standing-stones) from the point of view of the influence of semi-nomadic pastoralists from the Syrian desert frontier on the culture of urban societies, and of the negotiation of urban/tribal identities of city kings through ritual.

The following PowerPoint presentation (slides) contains information that was used as part of an online "Text-in-Translation Reading Group" (Seminar) led by Dylan Lawrence Gibson and hosted by Save Ancient Studies Alliance (SASA). It was funded by a grant from the Society for Classical Studies (Ancient Worlds, Modern Communities).

This was the first session from a series of 3 dedicated to discussing Ancient Near-Eastern music 'theory' cuneiform tablets:

Full Series Title: "An Introduction to Ancient Near-Eastern Music ‘Theory’: Understanding Musical Inscriptions"

Session 1 Title: "UET VII 126: String Names and Order of an Unknown Instrument"

This is ideal for students interested in the field of Archaeo-Musicology.

The Phaistos Disk is a hybrid phonic and alphabetic text written in the empire language of Akkadian dating to about 1800 BCE. It is a philosophical debate about the cause of a recent drought and it represents the first use of alphabetic letters. It has many letter sign similarities with the pure Alphabetic Akkadian texts found at Serabit el Khadim (1450-1250 BCE) and these similarities are what provided the extra knowledge needed for making the translation. Alphabetic letters are wildcard phonic signs meaning they are consonants with arbitrary following vowel sounds. As such they were a writing simplification scheme developed by traders, mercenaries and working priests. Akkadian provides the source words for the alphabetic letter names in both Greek and Semitic. The Phaistos Disk mentions magic, the gods Hu (sun form of Atu and the source of Greek Helios), Su (full moon), Yahu (Mesopotamian Ea and original form of Israelite Yahweh), the goddesses Ayu (sun “setter” and crescent moon, source of Greek Athena and Artemis, equivalent to Mesopotamian Ishtar and Inanna), and Utu (Minoan snake goddess). Finally, it mentions the divine birds which are the eagle-vultures and the Aku-owls (Athenian owls).

The paper presents an edition of two tablets of Old Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, a tablet from Tell Harmal (designated as OB Harmal1 in the edition by A.R. George) and a tablet from Nippur (OB Nippur in George’s edition). Both texts are extensively commented upon. New interpretations are proposed for ll. 3, 4, 7, 8, 9 in the tablet from Tell Harmal and ll. 5, 13//2′ in the Nippur tablet.

The presented master’s thesis deals with the Epic of Zimrī-Lîm, a text from the ancient city of Mari from the beginning of the 18th century BC. The text of the epic is included in transliteration (based on the edition by Michaël Guichard from 2014) and in English translation. The epic has also been published online as the first entry of NERE (Near Eastern Royal Epics) project on ORACC (Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus). In addition to the text itself, the thesis includes a broader historical-cultural commentary. There, selected elements of the ancient text are portraited as well-set within the lived cultural-political environment of the ancient Near East, with particular attention to the time of Zimrī-Lîm. Most of the space is devoted to the religious aspect of the work, especially the role of the deities. Last but not least, the composition is discussed within the context of other royal epics of the ancient Near East.

Email for full.  Ancient scribes writing Biblical Hebrew could mark a Goal argument (the place to which one is moving) with the directive he suffix, with a directional preposition, or as an accusative of destination.  Previous studies have explained this alternation in terms of a few historical or linguistic variables at a time.  In this study, I use a comprehensive dataset (all factive Goals from prose Biblical Hebrew texts), a broad set of potential explanatory variables coded for each Goal and the clause in which it appears (including more than thirty diachronic, social, and linguistic variables, with a particular focus on previously-understudied syntactic-semantic variables), various statistical tools (especially multinomial logistical regression), and comparative data (from Epigraphic Hebrew, Biblical Aramaic, Ugaritic, and Akkadian) to explore the influences on and choices of the ancient scribes.  Important findings of this study include indications that 1) scribes of the Late Biblical Hebrew corpus consciously promoted the use of directive he despite the convergence of the Late Biblical Hebrew goal-marking system with that of Aramaic, as evidenced in the behavior of the goal-marking prepositions across time (a conclusion not consistent with purely stylistic explanations of the linguistic differences between Classical and Late Biblical Hebrew); 2) due to educational and social disruptions during the exile, the scribes originating texts described as Transitional Biblical Hebrew mobilized fewer prestigious linguistic features than scribes of the Classical and Late corpora, as evidenced by limitations in their goal-marking repertoires and paralleled by data from other Semitic corpora; 3) the scribes’ choices between goal-marking strategies are largely driven by sensitivity to a Prototypical Intransitive Motion Construction (in which a salient Affected Agent moves successfully and completely to an inanimate single-point Goal that contains inherent, specific geographic information) and other Motion Construction prototypes (Caused-Motion, Pursuit, etc.), with the directive he and the accusative of direction being strongly correlated with more-prototypical environments; and 4) individual prepositions may encode the type of Goal location (single-point or divisible), the place of the Goal in the information structure of the text, the mover’s configuration with respect to the Goal, or Goal animacy.

This volume is the edited collection of the papers from a conference we hosted in Oxford in 2017, drawing together specialists from the United Kingdom, continental Europe and the United States, to examine afresh the relationship between early Greece and the civilisations of the ancient Near East. This is one of the most controversial and rapidly developing research topics in Classics, and the aim of the conference was to bring together Classicists and non-Classicists in a truly interdisciplinary environment, in which specialists from several different fields could observe and draw upon one another’s discoveries and knowledge. It was the first time that all major scholars who have so far contributed to the debate were assembled at a conference, a fact that was reflected by large crowd of over seventy participants at the Ioannou Centre in Oxford, over two full days. Our hope was that the resulting interchange would reflect on the disparate methodologies which have developed in these distinct fields, and move towards a new consensus. In order to achieve this, we limited the papers to the presentation of narratives to do with the gods; this led to a clear cross-fertilisation between papers (both in the general discussion and in the presentations), and a movement away from a narrow concern with the question of direct influence towards a more truly comparative perspective, in which the individual dynamics of the Greek and Near Eastern traditions help to illuminate what is distinctive about each of them. This represents a paradigm shift in a field once concerned solely with collecting literary parallels and letting them ‘speak for themselves’ (in Martin West’s famous words), and this is one of the major reasons why we think the resulting volume will cohere both thematically and as articulating a crucial moment in the history of scholarship on this question.

The volume serves two interconnected purposes. The first is that the book is an illustrative, handbook-like overview of the history and current state of the discussion, an aspect to be supported by an extensive Introduction to the volume, to be written by the editors. The second is that it offers new material and fresh approaches formulated by the leading scholars in the field. The volume will thus capture the state of the current discussion and shape the future debate. In keeping with the theme and discoveries of the conference, the chapters are not simply lists of parallels, but attempts to consider the processes of interaction and their significance for the texts being discussed.

The cast list of contributors is, as one should expect in a volume with this kind of ambition, international: Angus Bowie (Oxford), Yoram Cohen (Tel Aviv), Bruno Currie (Oxford), Andrew George (SOAS), Amir Gilan (Tel-Aviv), Johannes Haubold (Durham), Adrian Kelly (Oxford), Andre Lardinois (Nijmegen), Carolina Lopez-Ruiz (Ohio State), Christopher Metcalf (Oxford), Bernardo Petrella (Oxford), Fran Reynolds (Oxford), Ruth Scodel (Michigan), Robert Rollinger (Innsbruck), Ian Rutherford (Reading), Sylvie Vanséveren (Brussels), and Mark Weeden (SOAS).

The present article deals with the comparative method as applied to the Semitic cognate sets with phonological correspondences. It demonstrates how one with help of comparative Semitic approach and certain principles of analysis can establish a Proto-phoneme, how to reconstruct it and how to distinguish between true cognates and borrowed ones, illustrated through a set of case studies within the framework of phonological correspondences. For this task, historical linguistics prefer cognates from basic vocabulary (body parts, close kinship terms, and the like), since such terms are considered to resist borrowing more than other sorts of vocabulary. Applying this to the Semitic languages and looking for potential Semitic true cognates I have chosen cognate sets denoting body parts as the basic illustrative examples for my investigation, which in the course of discussion is widened to
include other illustrative examples.

The characteristically Isaianic term אליל for other gods does not have its roots in an earlier Semitic adjective, as has often been thought. Rather, it was adopted from Akkadian Illil/Enlil into Hebrew because it reflected the rhetoric of Neo-Assyrian rulers. As in Akkadian, it was used in an extended sense to refer to major divinities; and it was retained in the Isaianic tradition presumably because it was a useful term for »false gods«—readily comprehensible even as a new coinage, yet distinct from the terms used for Yhwh. As anti-idol polemics became increasingly prominent and vicious, the latest Isaianic tradents avoided אליל, preferring more overt terms for idols. Eventually, it came to be reanalyzed as an adjective and used as a mere insult: »worthless«.

par Florence Malbran-Labat.
—
Cet ouvrage permet d'acquérir les connaissances dont il présente une forme synthétique, pour mettre en évidence la structuration des marques, pour vérifier rapidement l'identification d'une forme. Il vient en complément du recueil d'exercices publié dans la même collection (LCA6 ).

L'auteur rassemble ici un ensemble de tableaux qui fournit le résumé des déclinaisons et des conjugaisons, ainsi que de l'organisation du système nominal et du système verbal. Il s'agit d'un outil pratique et d'usage fréquent pour qui veut apprendre l'akkadien. En effet, la morphologie de cette langue est riche et très structurée et la maîtrise de l'ensemble de ces données, nécessaire pour une compréhension précise et exacte des textes.

Un outil pratique

L'acquisition de ces connaissances est facilitée par des présentations didactiques qui aident la mémorisation et la prise de conscience des difficultés et de la réalité – ou de la fragilité – des acquis. Ces tableaux rassemblent les connaissances de base nécessaires pour l'analyse grammaticale des textes et fournissent deux éclairages différents sur la morphologie verbale : par paradigmes aspecto-temporels et par verbes selon la structure de la racine.

Détails et table des matières sur http://www.safran.be/proddetail.php?prod=LCA8