Sinister Bees and Desperate Pleas: Hittite Incantation Prayers

The purpose of the British Museum's Ashurbanipal Library Project is to investigate the content of the significant tablet collection that this Assyrian king assembled for his royal library. The initial project is focused on the Babylonian texts in order to establish the compositions involved and their relation to the rest of the Kouyunjik Collection and to the collecting activities of Ashurbanipal (668–627 BC).The examination of the Babylonian texts of Ashurbanipal's library is a difficult task. Whoever is familiar with the Nineveh texts knows that the tablets were originally stored in four different buildings (see Fig. 1): in the South-West Palace, in the North Palace, and in the vicinity of the temples of Ištar and Nabû, with some additional find spots on and off the mound Kouyunjik. It is the tablet collection of the South-West Palace that formed the library of Ashurbanipal, but the excavation reports of Nineveh very seldom refer to the places where the tablets were found. To reconstruct the different libraries and archives is a very time-consuming task and beyond the possibilities of the six-month timetable for this project. Therefore, for the time being, I decided to consider the Babylonian literary tablets and all legal documents written during the reign of Ashurbanipal and his predecessors as coming from one place, namely Ashurbanipal's library or libraries at Nineveh.While surveying the approximate figure of 26,000 tablets and fragments that the British excavators unearthed in Nineveh I entered the genre and content of the Babylonian texts in a database, together with a short description of the fragments, e.g. shape, colour, number of columns, lines and dividing lines. This database includes information on about 4290 tablets and fragments, of which 610 have already been rejoined to other fragments. Therefore, until now, the total number of Babylonian texts and fragments excavated in Nineveh is about 3680 — or in other words about one-seventh of all of the British Museum's Nineveh collection. The database I created also serves as a basis for collecting all texts of the same kind in order to identify joining fragments.

The tablet collections discovered in the Hittite capital are the largest collections of cuneiform texts in the Hittite language. In this paper the organization of the Hittite tablet collections will be examined on the basis of internal and external factors, i.e. colophons, labels, and catalogues. In particular, catalogues are not exhaustive lists of texts, but inventories of texts that were intended to be preserved for a longer period of time, and which were therefore continuously monitored and copied, and, in the course of time, reworked in various ways. Finally, collections management allows some reflections on genres of texts collected, copying practices, and typology of text collection (libraries or archives).

Herbert, Vaughan, and PubRc Concerne In Private Modes by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth Neither the George Herbert of The Temple nor his selfavowed disciple, the Henry Vaughan of Silex Scintillons, is a public poet in the ordinary sense of the term. The collection of each is subtitled "Sacred Poemsand Private Ejaculations,"and both concentrate on abiding themes: the manifestations of God and His will in the lives and actions of human beings and the quest for personal salvation. In total, neither collection is polemical. But the idemtifcation of God's will and its accomplishment on earth were very much public, even political issues in seventeenth-century England, and neither poet chose to retire from the world or to evade the particulars of the religious and political climate of his time. Scattered throughout both The Temple and the two parts of Sllex Scintillons are several poems that address public issues, notableamongthem works that directly treat the visible church. The modes of these poems are private — lyrical expressions of personal joy, alarm, sorrow, reflection, and prayer — but theyare set within Biblical and historical contexts that transcend the private convictions and personal desires of their authors. Herbert and Vaughan are distinctive poets;and inaddition to many personal differences between them, the differing external conditions under which they lived were crucial in shaping their public poetry. Although not altogether satisfied with the church of his day, George Herbert discovered in the Established Church the immanence of God. He creates public poetry by recognizing and lamenting the dangers that threaten the visible church, both from within and from without, and by placing the temporal and localized institution within a broad context of Judeo-Christian history that prophesied the apocalyptic destruction of God's enemies and the establishment of a New Jerusalem. Writing some two decades later, Vaughan reacted to the immediate issues posed by the Parliamentarian transformation of the Established Church — the unseating of her bishops, the proscription of her prayerbook, the desanctification of her buildings, the Summers and Pebworth abolishment of her forms — concerning himself with how to survive emotionally and spiritually in a time when "our beautiful gates are shut up, and the Comforter that should relieve our souls is gone far from us." ' In discovering the displaced Christ in the temple of nature —the enclosed garden of the allegorized Song of Songs — Vaughan translates his private quest for Christ and His spouse the Church into public poetry. The popular image of Herbert, based on Walton's biography of him and on the sweet tempered surfaces of his mature poems, might suggest that he was too tolerant to have engaged in sectarian controversy. Indeed, in A Priest to the Temple, he advises the parson to be "voyd of all contentiousnesse " while using "all possible diligence" in reducing those in his congregation who hold "strange Doctrins" to "the common Faith." 2 Nevertheless, Herbert was deeply concerned about doctrinal questions and about the effect of doctrinal division on the Established Church, 3 one of whose offices was to interpret "the obscurity in some points" of doctrine (Hutchinson, p. 263). The sweet reasonableness and calm assurance of such poems as "Divinitie" and "The British Church" — and the painful lamentation of "Church-rents and schismes" — have concealed the degree to which these poems participate in the religious controversies they decry. "Divinitie," for instance, seems at first glance a witty confutation of obscurantist speculators, an assertion of the superiority of faith to reason. Yet the poem goes beyond merely ridiculing the absurdity of theological quibbling to suggest that "the edge of wit" (I. 7) threatens to tear Christ's "seamlessecoat" (1. 1 1 ). the symbol "of loveand hence of unity in the Church." * In contrast to the "curious questions and divisions" (1. 12) raised by theological disputants, Christ's doctrine is "cleare as heav'n, from whence it came" (1. 14): "Loire God, end love your neighbour. Watch end pray. / Do as ye would be dono unto" (II. 17-18). The apparent simplicity of Christ's conflation of the whole message of the law and the prophets (Matt. 22:34-40; cf. Matt. 7:1 2) stands in opposition to the elaborate complexities and fine...

In the years around the turn of the present century, relying on the contacts and expertise of Theophilus Goldridge Pinches, Lord William Amhurst Tyssen-Amherst, 1st Baron Amherst of Hackney (1835–1909), put together what came to be one of the most wide-ranging and important collections of cuneiform tablets to have been assembled in private hands in this country. Since the publication of Volume 1 of The Amherst Tablets in 1908 by Pinches, followed much later by E. Sollberger's The Pinches Manuscript, the Amherst Collection has been familiar enough among Assyriologists, but perhaps less has been known of the collector, and of his other collections. The Museum at the family estate of Didlington Hall, Northwold, Norfolk, contained in its heyday a much broader range of material than cuneiform inscriptions. From the Near Eastern world there were very extensive collections of Egyptian papyri and antiquities, but the Hall also housed remarkable accumulations of incunabula and printed books, porcelain, tapestries, sculpture and other works of art. It is evident that the specific pursuit of cuneiform sources was inspired by a profound interest in the origin and development of writing and printing.The survival of a group of private letters covering the years 1896–1910, from Lord Amherst to Pinches, with some draft reply letters from Pinches and other relevant documents, has entailed the preservation of unusual information about the process of acquisition and the sources of the tablets themselves. The present paper offers a summary of this information, in the hope of conveying something of the circumstances and motives at play at such a period.

Power and Opposition in the Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean World – Introduction

The origins of medieval Jewish biblical exegesis are likely to be found in the interplay between the Babylonian Geonic rabbinical academies and Karaite Jewish biblical scholars, against the backdrop of the Islamic East, during the ninth to eleventh centuries. This medieval exegesis is to be distinguished from ancient rabbinic interpretations (midrash) such as are found in the Babylonian Talmud, the Talmud of the Land of Israel, and the various other classical rabbinic interpretative collections. It is true that additional (‘late’) midrashim continued to be composed in the early and high Middle Ages. However, the most truly innovative Jewish biblical scholarship, which grew out of the early medieval, ‘Judaeo-Islamic’ stage and which reached its apogee in the eleventh and especially the twelfth centuries, came in the realm of peshat , or ‘the study of scripture in its literary and historical context’. This peshat , or contextual, scholarship developed somewhat differently in Jewish communities in Spain and the Mediterranean world, on the one hand, and in the northern French rabbinic schools, on the other. Moreover, the European Jewish peshat approach had its analogue in European Christian ad litteram scholarship, developed by Victorine and other Parisian masters, which both influenced Jewish methodology and was influenced by it in return. By the thirteenth century, however, peshat biblical exegesis seemed to have run its course in both Spain and northern Europe. Prominent among the methodologies that took its place were philosophical exegesis, mysticism and a variety of homiletical and tosafistic (‘scholastic’) approaches that lie outside the parameters of this chapter. This chapter will briefly address late midrash, and will focus thereafter on Jewish contextual exegesis in the Islamic world and northern France.

This study employs Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) algorithms and comparative text mining to search 800,000 periodicals in JSTOR (Journal Storage) and HathiTrust from 1746 to 2014 to identify the types of conversations that emerge about Black women's shared experience over time and the resulting knowledge that developed called standpoint We used MALLET to interrogate various genres of text (poetry, science, psychology, sociology, African American Studies, policy, etc.). We also used comparative text mining (CTM) to explore latent themes across collections written in different time periods by analyzing the common and expert models. We used data visualization techniques, such as tree maps, to identify spikes in certain topics during various historical contexts such as slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow, etc. We identified a subset of our corpus (20,000) comprised of articles about or by or Black women and compared patterns of words in the subset against the larger 800,000 corpus. Preliminary findings indicate that when we pulled 300,000 volumes, about 800,000 (~27%) do not have subject metadata. This appears to suggest that if a researcher searched for volumes about Black women, they may not have access to a significant amount of data on the topic. When volumes are not tagged properly, researchers would have to know that these texts exists when they do their searches. The recovery nature of this project involves identifying these untagged volumes and making the corpus publicly available to librarians and others with copyright considerations.

The Basin of the Rivers Oxus and Jaxartes (which may be regarded as a single unit from the geographical as well as the historical point of view) has several times over played a particular part in the world's history. In conjunction with its complement, the Basin of the Tarim, it has served as a corridor or line of communication between the home-lands of several independent civilizations. By this route; the Middle Eastern World (and the Mediterranean World behind it) has communicated with India, and both India and the Middle East (sometimes alternately and, less often, simultaneously) with the Far Eastern World of China, Korea, and Japan.

WHO International Standard Terminologies on Traditional Chinese Medicine: Use in Context, Creatively

Reviewed by: Governing the Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and Necrocitizenship in Modern China by Linh D. Vu Daniel Asen Linh D. Vu. Governing the Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and Necrocitizenship in Modern China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021. 281 pp. Hardcover ($49.95) or e-book. In Governing the Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and Necrocitizenship in Modern China, Linh D. Vu examines the questions of “how and why a nation cares about its dead” (2) for a period of Chinese history stretching from the founding of the Republic to the Nanjing Decade, Second Sino-Japanese War, and Chinese Civil War. Vu’s approach is wide-ranging: readers will learn about the narratives and textual genres through which successive early twentieth-century Chinese regimes elevated political martyrs and constructed narratives of national history, the ways in which the state attempted to influence death ritual in order to claim political authority, and the bureaucratic regulations and procedures through which relatives of the war dead were compensated amid expanding domestic military conflict. This book is meant for a wide readership in modern Chinese history. It contains material that will be of interest to those who work in political and military history, social history, and cultural history. Vu’s attention to the details of compensation regulations and the process through which relatives of the dead sought benefits might also be of interest to those who study Republican civil law, given that these issues were so often related to how familial relations were defined in law and social practice. Notably, Vu is attentive to the societal and cultural impacts of wartime mass death and its commemoration in other historical contexts, such as in the United States during the American Civil War and in Europe after the First World War. This attention to the global history of death commemoration—as well as the book’s use of “necrocitizenry” and “necropolitics” as framing concepts, discussed below—suggests the possibility that scholars who work on similar issues in other times and places will find in Vu’s study a useful comparative case. Chapter 1 examines how the anti-Qing Yellow Flower Hill uprising of April 1911 was commemorated under the Nanjing Provisional Government, the regime of Yuan Shikai, and the Nationalist state of the early 1920s. Vu shows that these regimes’ efforts to claim legitimacy by commemorating anti-Qing revolutionaries imbued this uprising with new meanings as a symbol of national identity and unity, Confucian virtue, and partyled revolutionary martyrdom. Chapter 2 turns to the Nanjing Decade and the Nationalist state’s efforts to commemorate and lay claim to a broad range of “martyrs,” including anti-Qing reformers and revolutionaries, Nationalist military personnel who died fighting the forces of the Chinese Communist Party or Japan, and even bureaucrats who died of “overexertion.” The Nationalist government used the memory of these revered figures to augment the narrative of its own indispensable role in China’s recent history and to assert its political legitimacy as the inheritor of the Republic. Chapter 3 examines how relatives of those who were recognized as martyrs interacted with the bureaucracy that provided death benefits in the form of stipends, tuition [End Page E-12] assistance, and burial assistance. Vu shows that in practice this compensation system involved inconsistent regulations, a poorly defined financial base (which relied on local governments’ willingness to follow national compensation policies), and discontent among families who did not receive the benefits for which they petitioned. In chapter 4, Vu examines how widows and other female relatives of martyrs petitioned for compensation, the gendered subject-positions that they claimed for themselves in doing so, and the somewhat ambivalent forms of agency that these interactions with the state involved. Vu argues that, while such women were active agents in engaging the state’s compensation system, their petitioning strategies tended to invoke and thus reinforce “traditional wifely virtues of sacrifice and perseverance” (118). Similar tropes were also deployed in the commemoration of women who died while fighting or resisting the enemy. Chapter 5 examines how the prospect of “mass martyrization” (156) during the Second Sino-Japanese War led to ever-finer compensation regulations and procedures, expanded efforts to collect martyrs’ stories and compile...

Abstract: Prayer is the core of Christian spirituality, yet its essence is often overshadowed by formalism, routine, or self-presentation. Matthew 6:6-7 contains Jesus' teaching on prayer, emphasizing intimacy and sincerity as the foundation for communication with God. This study employs hermeneutic and linguistic methods to analyze key terms like tameion (private space), battalogeo (vain repetition), and ethnikoi (Gentiles), exploring their historical, theological, and cultural context. Results reveal that Jesus challenges the performative religiosity of His time, calling for personal and relational prayer that prioritizes quality over quantity. Theologically, this teaching introduces a profound understanding of God as a loving Father who knows human needs before they are spoken. This study highlights the relevance of Jesus' principles in overcoming modern challenges like digital distractions and performative spirituality. It concludes that authentic prayer is an act of faith, dependence, and love, fostering an intimate relationship with God. Abstrak: Doa merupakan inti dari kerohanian Kristen, namun esensinya sering kali dibayangi oleh formalisme, rutinitas, atau presentasi diri. Matius 6:6-7 memuat ajaran Yesus tentang doa, yang menekankan keintiman dan ketulusan sebagai dasar komunikasi dengan Tuhan. Kajian ini menggunakan metode hermeneutik dan linguistik untuk menganalisis istilah-istilah kunci seperti tameion (ruang privat), battalogeo (pengulangan yang sia-sia), dan ethnikoi (bangsa-bangsa lain), dengan mengeksplorasi konteks historis, teologis, dan budayanya. Hasilnya mengungkapkan bahwa Yesus menantang religiositas performatif pada zaman-Nya, menyerukan doa pribadi dan relasional yang mengutamakan kualitas daripada kuantitas. Secara teologis, ajaran ini memperkenalkan pemahaman yang mendalam tentang Tuhan sebagai Bapa yang penuh kasih yang mengetahui kebutuhan manusia sebelum kebutuhan itu diucapkan. Kajian ini menyoroti relevansi prinsip-prinsip Yesus dalam mengatasi tantangan modern seperti gangguan digital dan kerohanian performatif. Kajian ini menyimpulkan bahwa doa yang autentik adalah tindakan iman, ketergantungan, dan kasih, yang membina hubungan yang intim dengan Tuhan.

The article discusses the concept of logical incongruity as means of creating humorous effect in the Soviet narrative and aims at exploring the specifics of its translation from Russian into Spanish from a pragmalinguistic perspective. It is argued that the translator’s decisions are conditioned by cultural and historical context, text genre, author’s implicit intention and reader’s expectations. The findings of this study reveal a range of applied translation strategies and evaluate its effectiveness in achieving equal author’s ironic attitude and perlocutionary effect in target text

Word meaning changes over time, depending on linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. Associating a word's correct meaning in its historical context is a critical challenge in diachronic research, and is relevant to a range of NLP tasks, including information retrieval and semantic search in historical texts. Bayesian models for semantic change have emerged as a powerful tool to address this challenge, providing explicit and interpretable representations of semantic change phenomena. However, while corpora typically come with rich metadata, existing models are limited by their inability to exploit contextual information (such as text genre) beyond the document time-stamp. This is particularly critical in the case of ancient languages, where lack of data and long diachronic span make it harder to draw a clear distinction between polysemy and semantic change, and current systems perform poorly on these languages. We develop GASC, a dynamic semantic change model that leverages categorical metadata about the texts' genre information to boost inference and uncover the evolution of meanings in Ancient Greek corpora. In a new evaluation framework, we show that our model achieves improved predictive performance compared to the state of the art.

The diachronic trends in socio-economic and cultural development of the societies in the Nile valley are revealed based on the materials from Giza necropolis (the 3rd millennium BC) and the settlement of Abu Erteila (1st century AD). The research made it possible to trace the typological similarities in the evolution of the studied societies in cultural and historical contexts.
 The main fields of the research were epigraphy, iconography, social history, and material culture.
 Many previously unknown monuments discovered by Russian archaeologists in Egypt and Sudan were introduced into scientific discourse. The basis was created for studying the Nile valley as a contact zone between the Mediterranean world and Africa.

This Geological Society of London Special Publication arose from a meeting titled ‘Volcanoes, earthquakes and archaeology’ convened at Burlington House in London in 1997. The main theme running through the book is the integration of geology and archaeology in order to understand the impacts of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions on past societies, and to consider, in some cases, the lessons for understanding hazard and risk today. Of the 28 papers, most deal with aspects of volcanism, and most of the remainder with earthquakes. It is a rather eclectic collection, however, with a mixture of case study and review, historical asides and technical reports. This may explain why little attempt has been made to provide an overall structure to the volume, for example along chronological, geographical or phenomenological lines. A number of papers integrate archaeological data, literary sources, and geological information to reconstruct the kinematics of ancient earthquakes in the Mediterranean world, their impacts on the societies they disturbed and, in some cases, the implications for assessment of future seismic hazard. Buck & Stewart analyse ambiguities in the texts of Strabo, Thucydides and others to discriminate between reports of earthquakes in central Greece. In a similar vein, Jones & Stithos argue for caution in ascribing the sociopolitical outcomes of major earthquakes on ancient cities, urging for individual cases to be considered always within the historical context. Hancock et al. focus on the Roman city of Heirapolis, Turkey, and discuss interrelationships between earthquake faulting, travertine deposition, and …