Transformations of the Inner Self in Ancient Religions /
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This collection of papers from two workshops - held in Heidelberg, Germany, in July 1996 and Jerusalem, Israel, in October 1997 - is concerned with anthropological rather than theological aspects of the Near Eastern and Mediterranean religions, ranging from the 'primary' religions of the archaic period and their complex developments in Egypt and Mesopotamia to the 'soteriological' movements and 'secondary' religions that emerged in Late Antiquity. The first part of the book focuses on \'Confession and Conversion\', while the second part is devoted to the topic of \'Guilt, Sin and Rituals of Purification\'. The primary purpose of this volume is to convey a sense of the dynamics and dialectical relationships between the various Near Eastern and Mediterranean religions from the archaic period to Late Antiquity.
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Two contributions in German, one in French. :
1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references. :
9789004379084 :
0169-8834 ;
Homeland and exile : biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies in honour of Bustenay Oded /
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This volume is a scholarly tribute to Bustenay Oded's distinguished career from some of the many contemporaries, colleagues, and former students who not only admire, and keep being inspired by his achievements, but who also count him as a friend. The title points to the remarkable span of Bustenay Oded 's research and research interests. Accordingly, the Festschrift's thirty original contributions deal with a wide range of topics, focusing on the Assyrian Empire, as well as on the Hebrew Bible and other cultural contents.
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1 online resource. :
"Works by Professor Bustenay Oded": pages [xi]-xvi.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes. :
9789047441243 :
0083-5889 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The quality of heroic living, of high endeavour and adventure : Anglican mission, women, and education in Palestine, 1888-1948 /
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This work focuses on Anglican mission and women's education in Palestine in the period from 1888 till 1948. As part of the \'enlightenment movement\' the project was initiated by British women educational pioneers, who influenced women to carry out the creed of academic training for girls also in colonial areas. While the educational profile of the pre-World War One schools mainly focused on modernisation of the domestic role, during the British Mandate the highly educated Anglican women teachers had two aims for their work: To create a peaceful multi-cultural environment in a society characterised by religious and ethnic strife and secondly to introduce a modern feminine ideal to Christian, Muslim and Jewish middle-and upper class girls. This study contributes to our knowledge of the Anglican missionary project, the role of women misionaries/educators and the history of Palestine.
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1 online resource (xxxvii, 357 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. 342-350) and index. :
9789004320062 :
0924-9389 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Walls of the prince : Egyptian interactions with Southwest Asia in antiquity : essays in honour of John S. Holladay, Jr. /
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Walls of the Prince offers a series of articles that explore Egyptian interactions with Southwest Asia during the second and first millennium BCE, including long-distance trade in the Middle Kingdom, the itinerary of Thutmose III's great Syrian campaign, the Amman Airport structure, anthropoid coffins at Tell el-Yahudiya, Egypt's relations with Israel in the age of Solomon, Nile perch and other trade with the southern Levant and Transjordan in the Iron Age, Saite strategy at Mezad Hashavyahu, and the concept of resident alien in Late Period Egypt. These are complemented by methodological and typological studies of data from the archaeological investigations at Tell al-Maskhuta, the Wadi Tumilat, and Mendes in the eastern Nile delta. Together, they reflect the diverse range of Professor Holladay's long and distinguished scholarly career.
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1 online resource (xx, 436 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004302563 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The fabric of cities : aspects of urbanism, urban topography and society in Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome /
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The Fabric of Cities presents an interdisciplinary collection of articles on urbanism in ancient Mesopotamia, Israel, Greece and Rome, which focuses on the social dimension of cities' topographical features. The contributions of this book offer investigations of neighbourhoods, city gates, streets, temples and palaces drawing on textual and archaeological sources as well as art. The topics treated in this work encompass the diverse functions of public and marginal spaces in Mesopotamian cities and Rome, the role of agency in the development of Babylonian neighbourhoods, the relationship between public and private in Assyrian palaces, the connection between political strategies and temple building in Sumerian literary texts, and the communicative uses of language in Classical Greek texts to talk about urban space.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004262348
A cultural history of Aramaic : from the beginnings to the advent of Islam /
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Aramaic is a constant thread running through the various civilizations of the Near East, ancient and modern, from 1000 BCE to the present, and has been the language of small principalities, world empires, and a fair share of the Jewish-Christian tradition. Holger Gzella describes its cultural and linguistic history as a continuous evolution from its beginnings to the advent of Islam. For the first time the individual phases of the language, their socio-historical underpinnings, and the textual sources are discussed comprehensively in light of the latest linguistic and historical research and with ample attention to scribal traditions, multilingualism, and language as a marker of cultural self-awareness. Many new observations on Aramaic are thereby integrated into a coherent historical framework.
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1 online resource (466 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004285101 :
0169-9423 ;
0169-9423 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Revolt and resistance in the ancient Classical world and the Near East : in the crucible of empire /
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This collection of essays contains a state of the field discussion about the nature of revolt and resistance in the ancient world. While it does not cover the entire ancient world, it does focus in on the key revolts of the pre-Roman imperial world. Regardless of the exact sequence, it was an undeniable fact that the area we now call the Middle East witnessed a sequence of extensive empires in the second half of the last millennium BCE. At first, these spread from East to West (Assyria, Babylon, Persia). Then after the campaigns of Alexander, the direction of conquest was reversed. Despite the sense of inevitability, or of divinely ordained destiny, that one might get from the passages that speak of a sequence of world-empires, imperial rule was always contested. The essays in this volume consider some of the ways in which imperial rule was resisted and challenged, in the Assyrian, Persian, and Hellenistic (Seleucid and Ptolemaic) empires. Not every uprising considered in this volume would qualify as a revolution by this definition. Revolution indeed was on the far end of a spectrum of social responses to empire building, from resistance to unrest, to grain riots and peasant rebellions. The editors offer the volume as a means of furthering discussions on the nature and the drivers of resistance and revolution, the motivations for them as well as a summary of the events that have left their mark on our historical sources long after the dust had settled.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004330184 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Jewish cultural encounters in the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern world /
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The essays in this volume originate from the Third Qumran Institute Symposium held at the University of Groningen, December 2013. Taking the flexible concept of "cultural encounter" as a starting point, the essays in this volume bring together a panoply of approaches to the study of various cultural interactions between the people of ancient Israel, Judea, and Palestine and people from other parts of the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern world. In order to study how cultural encounters shaped historical development, literary traditions, religious practice and political systems, the contributors employ a broad spectrum of theoretical positions (e.g., hybridity, métissage, frontier studies, postcolonialism, entangled histories and multilingualism), to interpret a diverse set of literary, documentary, archaeological, epigraphic, numismatic, and iconographic sources.
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1 online resource. :
9789004336919 :
1384-2161 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Manières de penser dans l'antiquité mediterranéenne et orientale : mélanges offerts à Francis Schmidt par ses élèves, ses collègues et ses amis /
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Francis Schmidt's works in various fields of religious studies (mainly ancient Judaism), can be characterized by three words: historiography, anthropological history, and comparatism. In that respect he placed himself in the continuation of previous French scholars, such as Maurice Halbwachs or Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Francis Schmidt also played an essential role in transmitting to a new generation of scholars the complex issues and debates concerning the Dead Sea scrolls and Qumranic research. The papers offered in this volume share all the same interest in ancient religions and the methodological devices previously mentioned. They offer a rare example of a large comparatism between Assyrian, Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian approaches of some essential social or intellectual issues, by some of the most competent specialists in each field.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047428633 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
On the art in the ancient Near East /
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This volume of collected essays brings together for the first time the range of Winter's pioneering studies related to Neo-Assyrian relief sculpture and seals, Phoenician and Syrian ivory and bronze production, and inter-polity connections across the various cultures of first millennium B.C.E. from the Aegean to Iran. Consistent threads are an emphasis on the potential for art historical analysis to yield 'history' in the broadest sense; the importance of making the theoretical frame of interpretation explicit; and the necessity of textual evidence being brought to bear upon elements of formal analysis and archaeological context. "These beautifully produced volumes bring together essays written over a 35-year period, creating a whole that is much more than the sum of its parts...No library should be without this impressive collection." J.C. Exum
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047425847
Aux origines des messianismes juifs : actes du colloque international tenu en Sorbonne, à Paris, les 8 et 9 juin 2010 /
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Les termes « messie » et « messianisme » recouvrent aujourd'hui une désignation exagérément large au regard de leur sens initial dans le judaïsme et le christianisme. Ils sont utilisés dans des contextes qui empruntent souvent inconsciemment aux modèles rhétoriques à l'oeuvre dans le judaïsme ancien et dans le christianisme primitif. Le livre s'intéresse à ces modèles qui caractérisent l'histoire intellectuelle du premier messianisme juif. Tout d'abord, l'émergence du messianisme est examinée à travers les modèles de divinisation du roi dans le Proche-Orient ancien (Égypte, Mésopotamie, culture cananéenne), et à travers l'évolution de l'idéologie royale dans l'Israël ancien. D'autre part, les premiers textes chrétiens ont mis en avant la fusion des attentes messianiques en une seule figure de messie (Jésus-Christ), mais la pluralité des figures messianiques semble prévaloir dans la littérature juive ancienne. ____________________________________ The words 'messiah' and 'messianism' are presently used in a too wide significance in comparison with their original meaning in Judaism and Christianity. Nevertheless, they often borrow unconsciously from rhetorical models at work in Ancient Judaism and Christianity. The book constitutes a series of studies on these models which characterize the intellectual history of the first Jewish messianism. Firstly, the birth of messianism is studied across the divinization of kings in Ancient Near East (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Canaanite culture) and secondly, the change of royal ideology in Ancient Israel to messianism. Thirdly, the first Christian texts have promoted the merging of messianic expectations in one messianic figure (Jesus-Christ), but the plurality of messiahs seem to prevail in early Jewish literature.
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1 online resource (xi, 240 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004251670 :
0083-5889 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Leisure, pleasure, and healing : spa culture and medicine in ancient eastern Mediterranean /
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The book deals with leisure, pleasure and healing at the thermo-mineral sites in the Levant since the biblical era throughout the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, and early Muslim periods. It looks closely at the question of whether the spas, which are models for social interaction between pagans, Christians and Jews, served as sacred cult places or popular sites of healing. The main objectives of the book are as follows: • Clarifying the leisure-time activities at the spas based on Classical and Rabbinic literature, pilgrims' travel-books, Syriac and Arabic texts, the Geniza fragments, cartographic evidence, and archaeological findings. • Lightening the daily life, healing cults, medical recommendations and treatments. • Examining the social history of medicine at the curative baths.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047420514 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Historiography and self-definition : Josephos, Luke-Acts, and apologetic historiography /
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For centuries scholars have recognized the apologetic character of the Hellenistic Jewish historians, Josephos, and Luke-Acts; they have not, however, adequately addressed their possible relationships to each other and to their wider cultures. In this first full systematic effort to set these authors within the framework of Greco-Roman traditions, Professor Sterling has used genre criticism as a method for locating a distinct tradition of historical writing, apologetic historiography. Apologetic historiography is the story of a subgroup of people which deliberately Hellenizes the traditions of the group in an effort to provide a self-definition within the context of the larger world. It arose as a result of a dialectic relationship with Greek ethnography. This work traces the evolution of this tradition through three major eras of eastern Mediterranean history spanning six hundred years: the Persian, the Greek, and the Roman.
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1 online resource (xiv, 500 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references (p. 394-426) and indexes. :
9789004266940 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
History and traditions of early Israel : studies presented to Eduard Nielsen, May 8th 1993 /
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This book is published as a Festschrift on the occasion of the 70th birthday of professor Eduard Nielsen (Copenhagen). In accordance with the main themes of Eduard Nielsen's scholarly works the articles concentrate on the history of early Israel, id est Israel before the classical prophets in the 8th century B.C., and on literary traditions referring to this phase of Israelite history. The articles are concerned with topics in the Books of the Pentateuch, with the epoch of King David, as well as with archaeology, Canaanite traditions et cetera Eduard Nielsen's bibliography is included at the end of the book.
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1 online resource. :
"Eduard Nielsen-biblioography": pages [161]-165. :
9789004275744 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Geschenke und Steuern, Zölle und Tribute : antike Abgabenformen in Anspruch und Wirklichkeit /
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This book examines modes of economic contribution in the ancient world through taxes, tribute, or so-called gifts. Specialists in the field of the ancient Near East, Egypt, classical Greece, Rome, and Israel, joined by an economic anthropologist, present a fresh evaluation of the textual and archaeological evidence. A prime question explored is the extent to which these disparate sources complement or contradict each other. State-imposed transactions were often recorded with an ideological bias, much dependent on whether the donors and recipients were viewed as in- or outsiders. The present interdisciplinary approach supplies the basis for the ancient economic terminology of contribution, taking into account the specific cultural context, the language of 'international' policy, and the correlation between modern and ancient termini.
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Conference proceedings. :
1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and indexes. :
9789047422952 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Protest or propaganda : war in the Old Testament book of Kings and in contemporaneous ancient Near Eastern texts /
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In this study, the war stories from the Old Testament book of Kings are compared to ten extrabiblical texts. Narratological analysis is applied to deconstruct the ideology of the respective literary compositions. The Old Testament ideology of war seems to be neither typically Israelite, as Gerhardt von Rad put it, nor commonly Ancient Near Eastern, as Manfred Weippert thought it to be. This poses the question whether the reading experience of biblical war stories is so very different from, for instance, Assyrian royal inscriptions, both in terms of its literary value and its ideological bias. Narratological analysis turns out to be a strong tool for explaining the similarities and distinctive features of the respective texts.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [689]-700) and indexes. :
9789047443414 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Continuity and innovation in the Aramaic legal tradition /
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Ever since the Elephantine papyri were first published over a century ago, scholars have speculated on the origins of the well-developed legal formularies used in these documents. Since then, many more Aramaic deeds of conveyance both from Elephantine and from elsewhere have been published, especially within the last decade or so. With this expanded text base now available, the time is ripe for a comprehensive re-assessment of these legal formularies. This book endeavors to show that these disparate Aramaic documents, whose chronological scope spans several centuries, form a discrete and coherent tradition. It isolates and identifies the distinctive elements that form the core of this tradition and traces the histories of these elements back through the cuneiform record.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [204]-226) and index. :
9789047442226 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Arabic and its alternatives : religious minorities and their languages in the emerging nation states of the Middle East (1920-1950) /
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"Arabic and its Alternatives discusses the complicated relationships between language, religion and communal identities in the Middle East in the period following the First World War. This volume takes its starting point in the non-Arabic and non-Muslim communities, tracing their linguistic and literary practices as part of a number of interlinked processes, including that of religious modernization, of new types of communal identity politics and of socio-political engagement with the emerging nation states and their accompanying nationalisms. These twentieth-century developments are firmly rooted in literary and linguistic practices of the Ottoman period, but take new turns under influence of colonization and decolonization, showing the versatility and resilience as much as the vulnerability of these linguistic and religious minorities in the region. Contributors are Tijmen C. Baarda, Leyla Dakhli, Sasha R. Goldstein-Sabbah, Liora R. Halperin, Robert Isaf, Michiel Leezenberg, Merav Mack, Heleen Murre-van den Berg, Konstantinos Papastathis, Franck Salameh, Cyrus Schayegh, Emmanuel Szurek, Peter Wien".
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Includes index. :
1 online resource. :
9789004423220