Dating Of Texts Research Articles

Quarterly chronicle and documentation

AbstractThe principal sources of information on which this chronicle is based are British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Political and British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Economic. These sources, now only available online, do not have reference numbers and are only identifiable by date of publication of material. The inclusion of each of these dates would unnecessarily clutter the text and such dates have therefore been omitted, except, at many points, for the original sources from which the BBC reports themselves are taken.

Understanding Om (Aum), Turīya, and the Three States of Consciousness in the Māndūkya Upanisad

Many people have heard of the sacred sound Aum, but do we really understand what it means or what it is? This article answers that question by examining the original text in which the sacred syllable of Aum is introduced. The three letters that make up the sound Aum each represents a corresponding psychological state. Waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep are the three main states of consciousness explored in the Mā ūkya Upaniad, a small section contained within the larger Hindu text known as the Upaniads. Some of these texts date back to around the second millennium b.c.e. What can these ancient explorations of human consciousness teach us today and how do they relate to modern depth psychology? The shortest of the Upaniads, the Mā ūkya Upaniad, may be said to hold some of the most profound psychological reflections in all of Indian religious philosophy. In addition to these three states of being, the elusive fourth state, known as Turīya, is also explored in relation to the sacred syllable Aum. This article integrates the commentaries of various Indian gurus with a perspective from analytical psychology. The sounds comprising Aum are explored symbolically and in terms of their psychological meaning, and the psychological role and function of spiritual practices, both East and West, are considered.

Quarterly chronicle and documentation

The principal sources of information on which this chronicle is based are British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Political and British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Economic. These sources, only available electronically, do not have reference numbers and are only identifiable by date of publication of material. The inclusion of each of these dates would unnecessarily clutter the text and such dates have therefore been omitted, except, at many points, for the original sources from which the BBC reports themselves are taken.

Quarterly chronicle and documentation

The principal sources of information on which this chronicle is based are British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Political and British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Economic. These sources, only available electronically, do not have reference numbers and are only identifiable by date of publication of material. The inclusion of each of these dates would unnecessarily clutter the text and such dates have therefore been omitted, except, at many points, for the original sources from which the BBC reports themselves are taken.

Quarterly chronicle and documentation

The principal sources of information on which this chronicle is based are British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Political and British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Economic. These sources, now only available electronically, do not have reference numbers and are only identifiable by date of publication of material. The inclusion of each of these dates would unnecessarily clutter the text and such dates have therefore been omitted, except, at many points, for the original sources from which the BBC reports themselves are taken.

Quarterly chronicle and documentation

The principal sources of information on which this chronicle is based are British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Political and British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Economic. These sources, now only available online, do not have reference numbers and are only identifiable by date of publication of material. The inclusion of each of these dates would unnecessarily clutter the text and such dates have therefore been omitted, except, at many points, for the original sources from which the BBC reports themselves are taken.

From the Editors: Premodern Lessons for Modern Historians

From the EditorsPremodern Lessons for Modern Historians It is no secret that most Western historians of Russia study the period after 1700, indeed after the Great Reforms. Only a brave and resourceful minority focuses on the Muscovite era, and those who venture even farther back are truly few and far between. This is not healthy for our profession. The modernist bias harms efforts to conceptualize the wider sweep of Russian history in both teaching and research by granting unnaturally long life to questionable myths about the medieval and Muscovite legacy—hence, for example, the tendency to overrate the import of the idea of Moscow as the "Third Rome." It also hurts our students by leaving them, and us, at the mercy of antiquated scholarship. Before Chester S. L. Dunning's recent book,1 the standard text on the Time of Troubles was Platonov's, first published in 1923.2 Who today would teach the history of, say, the English Civil War from textbooks more than 80 years old? Some of the contributors to the present issue of Kritika show the modernists among us a further important reason why we would benefit from looking outside our own chronological bailiwick: the problem of what to do with sources. While source criticism has been with us at least since Ranke's day, several more recent developments have increased its significance: the broader definition of what constitutes a source that accompanied the emergence of social and cultural history; the closer attention to "texts" that followed the rise of "theory"; the Internet; and, in our field, the post-communist "archival revolution." The challenge many of us face in studying the more modern periods is how to sift through, and make sense of, an ever-expanding mass of [End Page 711] evidentiary material. Nor does it make life easier when editors (including this very column a few months ago) ask authors to provide more details about their archival sources even while publishers insist on tighter word limits for manuscripts.3 On the bright side, of course, the embarrassment of riches is such that well-crafted research projects are rarely threatened by a lack of sources; the challenge is instead to design projects that are broad enough to command interest but do not trigger a tsunami of unmanageable documentation. This rapport with the sources shapes our own perception of how we in the present relate to the past, and it is what we communicate to our readers and students as well. By contrast, as the contributors to this issue remind us, scholars of pre-Petrine Russia face a rather different situation. Edward L. Keenan and Norman Ingham offer conflicting reviews of Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Zimin's book disputing the authenticity of Slovo o Polku Igoreve [the Igor´ Tale], regarded by many as a foundational text of medieval Russian literature. Keenan, of course, has made something of a career out of challenging key pre-Petrine Russian sources with his own books on the Slovo and on the correspondence between Ivan the Terrible and Prince Andrei Kurbskii.4 The deeper Keenan and Ingham (and Zimin) burrow into the complexities and ambiguities of the Slovo's obscure history, the more they leave the non-medievalist reader with an uncomfortable sense of doubt about whether we can know much of anything at all about Kievan Rus´. Nor are things much better as late as the 16th century. In a review essay last year, Carolyn Pouncy noted that historians writing broad, synthetic texts about Ivan the Terrible and his era continue to read key sources as having unambiguous meanings that were first attributed to them in the 19th century, even though more recent studies have raised considerable doubts about the dating, authorship, and other essential aspects of these same texts. From this, she concluded, "As historians, we need to recognize that much of the received wisdom regarding pre-Petrine history is no more than someone's speculation, repeated until it has acquired the aura of truth."5 This phenomenon rarely occurs in the work of modernists, whom the abundance of documentation has accustomed to expecting that disputes about sources—for example, about the authenticity of Peter the Great's alleged testament—can...

Quarterly chronicle and documentation

The principal sources of information on which this chronicle is based are British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Political and British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Economic. These sources, now only available online, do not have reference numbers and are only identifiable by date of publication of material. The inclusion of each of these dates would unnecessarily clutter the text and such dates have therefore been omitted, except, at many points, for the original sources from which the BBC reports themselves are taken.

Quarterly chronicle and documentation

The principal sources of information on which this chronicle is based are British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Political and British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Economic. These sources, only available electronically, do not have reference numbers and are only identifiable by date of publication of material. The inclusion of each of these dates would unnecessarily clutter the text and such dates have therefore been omitted, except, at many points, for the original sources from which the BBC reports themselves are taken.

Les textes de V récent du Chantier B à Suse (finsukkalmaḫat- ca. 1575-1530 av. notre ère)

This article presents the publication of the cuneiform texts found in level V recent during the excavation of the chantier B in the Ville royale of Susa by the Delegation Archeologique francaise en Iran under the direction of Roman Ghirshman (winter 1966-1967). These texts date from the end of sukkalmahat (ca. 1575-1530 BCE) and are the only group of texts from this period for which archaeological information is available. Firstly, the archaeological context of the chantier B and level V recent in particular are given. After a short analysis of the content of the texts, they are presented in transliteration, translation and copy, and are completed with extensive philological notes. An index of the personal names occurring in the texts is provided.

The Origins of the Hebrew Bible: Some New Answers to Old Questions

AbstractIn two recent studies, one by William M. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book, the other by David M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart, these scholars present their answers to the age old question of how the Hebrew Bible came into being as a special collection of edited and canonized books. Both scholars reject the older formula of a three stage process of Law (400 BCE), Prophets (ca. 200 BCE), and Writings (First Century CE). Schniedewind, on the one hand, proposes an editorial process of collection and arrangement of traditional material within the preexilic royal court and among the royal scribes in captivity in Babylon that gave rise to an authoritative corpus, which was then augmented with some later works in the Persian and Hellenistic periods. Carr, on the other hand, sees the collection and selection of biblical books within an educational process of enculturation that was continuous over an extended period from simple oral tradition in early Israel to the final stages of curricular consolidation, i.e., the canon, in which the priests play a major role. This study will examine a set of issues (e.g. orality and literacy; dating and composition of texts; editing and transmission of texts in antiquity; the role of texts in education) that are covered by these studies, and will offer some alternative suggestions for consideration.

Written Accounts of an Amazonian Landscape Over the Last 450 Years

Books, articles, government documents, and other written accounts of tropical biology and conservation reach a tiny fraction of their potential audience. Some texts are inaccessible because of the language in which they are written. Others are only available to subscribers of developed-world journals, or distributed narrowly within tropical countries. To examine this dysfunction in the tropical literature--and what it means for conservation--we tried to compile everything ever written on the biology and conservation of the department of Madre de Dios, Peru, in southwestern Amazonia. Our search of libraries, databases, and existing bibliographies uncovered 2,202 texts totaling roughly 80,000 pages. Texts date from 1553 to 2004, but 93% were written after 1970. Since that year the publication rate has increased steadily from fewer than 10 texts/year to nearly 3 texts/week in 2004. Roughly half of the Madre de Dios bibliography is in Spanish-language texts written by Peruvian authors and mostly inaccessible outside Peru. Most of the remaining material is English-language texts written by foreign authors and largely inaccessible in Peru. Foreign authors tended to write about ecological studies with limited relevance to on-the-ground conservation challenges, whereas Peruvian authors were more likely to make specific management recommendations. The establishment of a Web-based digital library for Neotropical nature would help make the tropical literature a more efficient resource for science and conservation. Additional recommendations include investing in syntheses, translations, popular summaries, and peer-reviewed journals in tropical countries, providing incentives for management-relevant research in tropical protected areas, and reinforcing training of scientific reading and writing in tropical universities.

Quarterly Chronicle and Documentation (October–December 2005)

SourcesThe principal sources of information on which this chronicle is based are British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Political and British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Economic. These sources, now only available electronically, do not have reference numbers and are only identifiable by date of publication of material. The inclusion of each of these dates would unnecessarily clutter the text and such dates have therefore been omitted, except, at many points, for the original sources from which the BBC reports themselves are taken.

Miniature Codices from Kellis

AbstractThis article contains a first edition of two wooden mini-codices found during Australian excavations at Ismant el-Kharab (ancient Kellis) in the Dakhleh Oasis (Egypt). The first codex contains fifteen Greek hexameters belonging to an anonymous and unknown parody of Homer; the second codex contains three Greek division tables. Both texts date from the fourth century CE and apparently come from a local school.

Using Linguistic Difference in Relative Text Dating: Insights from other Historical Linguistic Case Studies

The article addresses the question as to how optimistic we can be about the possibility and accuracy in converting linguistic typology into linguistic chronology. Applying the insights from standard text books on historical linguistic theory and the implementation of these insights in two particular case studies—namely the dating of Old English and Eddic (Old Norse) Poetry—the article argues for a balanced view on the possibility of determining the chronological stage(s) of the Hebrew language represented by biblical texts embedded and preserved in late copies from the second century B.C.E. or later. As historical linguists in general use a very restrained language in describing the possibility of dating texts linguistically, we should expect historical Hebrew linguists to be equally cautious. However, since the case studies reveal at least some reasons for describing linguistic criteria for dating autographs or earlier copies of texts in late, extant manuscripts, we should also expect enough evidence to establish some kind of diachronic grid in the development of the Hebrew language that can be used for at least a relative dating of texts that cannot be dated on other grounds. Especially Hurvitz's focus on lexicographical change and Eskhult's on loanwords seem promising areas in this regard.

Quarterly Chronicle and Documentation (July–September 2005)

SourcesThe principal sources of information on which this chronicle is based are British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Political and British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Economic. These sources, now only available electronically, do not have reference numbers and are only identifiable by date of publication of material. The inclusion of each of these dates would unnecessarily clutter the text and such dates have therefore been omitted, except, at many points, for the original sources from which the BBC reports themselves are taken.

Quarterly chronicle and documentation (april–june 2005)

sourcesthe principal sources of information on which this chronicle is based are british broadcasting corporation, monitoring global news line – asia-pacific political and british broadcasting corporation, monitoring global news line – asia-pacific economic. these sources, now only available electronically, do not have reference numbers and are only identifiable by date of publication of material. the inclusion of each of these dates would unnecessarily clutter the text and such dates have therefore been omitted, except, at many points, for the original sources from which the bbc reports themselves are taken.

Why minds are changed: an inquiry into the decisions by the Gereformeerde Kerke in Suid-Afrika (GKSA) on the role of women in the church

Reading a text presupposes, at least to some extent, an attempt on the part of the reader to understand the text. This process is not always a smooth one, especially not when the text dates from a time and place very foreign to the reader. This article investigates one of the ways in which these “rough places”, that inevitably limits the understanding of an ancient text, can to some extent be overcome. It takes as point of departure a modern-day contribution to literary theory. This is placed within the framework of a discussion in the GKSA with regard to the role of women in the church. It is suggested that the continuation of an interpretative tradition depends on the interaction between such a tradition and society.

Quarterly Chronicle and Documentation (January–March 2005)

SourcesThe principal sources of information on which this chronicle is based are British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Political and British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Economic. These sources, now only available electronically, do not have reference numbers and are only identifiable by date of publication of material. The inclusion of each of these dates would unnecessarily clutter the text and such dates have therefore been omitted, except, at many points, for the original sources from which the BBC reports themselves are taken.

Quarterly Chronicle and Documentation (October–December 2004)

SourcesThe principal sources of information on which this chronicle is based are British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Political and British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Economic. These sources, now only available on-line, do not have reference numbers and are only identifiable by date of publication of material. The inclusion of each of these dates would unnecessarily clutter the text and such dates have therefore been omitted, except, at many points, for the original sources from which the BBC reports themselves are taken.