Empirische Dimension Altorientalischer Forschungen

This volume's 23 contributions from senior and younger researchers working with the Ancient Near Eastern heritage are based on the hypothesis of a general empiric attitude of Ancient Mesopotamian scholarship. The articles try to elucidate these underlying principles, making use of various sorts of modern theories and methods. The book covers a broader range of topics: astronomy, politics, agriculture and irrigation, linguistics, architecture, medicine and others.

While Human-Animal Studies is a rapidly growing field in modern history, studies on this topic that focus on the Ancient World are few. The present volume aims at closing this gap. It investigates the relation between humans, animals, gods, and things with a special focus on the structure of these categories. An improved understanding of the ancient categories themselves is a precondition for any investigation into the relation between them. The focus of the volume lies on the Ancient Near East, but it also provides studies on Ancient Greece, Asia Minor, Mesoamerica, the Far East, and Arabia.

This volume offers the first holistic examination of the Astronomical Diaries, a remarkable set of 1000 clay tablets from ancient Babylon in which for over 500 years (6th–1st century BCE) scholars combined astronomical observations with records of events on earth.

Traditionally, writing--a graphic, multidimensional form of communication--has been approached as a vehicle for representing, and therefore conveying, the spoken word. Moving beyond this manner of analysis, this volume interrogates writing as a medium that is not simply a handmaiden to oral and aural exchange but a communication system that is richly layered and experienced. To exploit this aspect of visual code, scholars from the fields of Egyptology, Sinology, Hittitology, and Assyriology, together with Mesoamericanists, art historians, and a sign language specialist, are brought together in this volume. In its pages, these contributors incorporate into their analyses methods more commonly used in linguistics and semiotics, communication studies, art historical analysis, and traditional philology to new ends in order to form original trajectories of inquiry. Each contribution either lays bare explicit exploitation of visuality in scribal production as a means to cement power, reveal the mystical, induce humor, or expose clandestine views or it locates implicit knowledge schemes and cultural maps underlying and informing these same productions. The pioneering investigations presented in Seen Not Heard reveal that although writing may be heard, the fact that it can also be seen affects its reception and therefore the meaning of any transported phonological units.

The reconstruction of ancient Mesopotamian medical, ritual and omen compendia and their complex history is still characterised by many difficulties, debates and gaps due to fragmentary or unpublished evidence. This book offers the first complete edition of the Assur Medical Catalogue, an 8th or 7th century BCE list of therapeutic texts, which forms a core witness for the serialisation of medical compendia in the 1st millennium BCE. The volume presents detailed analyses of this and several other related catalogues of omen series and rituals, constituting the corpora of divination and healing disciplines. The contributions discuss links between catalogues and textual sources, providing new insights into the development of compendia between serialization, standardization and diversity of local traditions. Though its a novel corpus-based approach, this volume revolutionizes the current understanding of Mesopotamian medical texts and the healing disciplines of "conjurer" and "physician". The research presented here allows one to identify core text corpora for these disciplines, as well as areas of exchange and borrowings between them.

There is to date no comprehensive treatment of eye disease texts from ancient Mesopotamia, and no English translation of this material is available. This volume is the first complete edition and commentary on Mesopotamian medicine from Nineveh dealing with diseases of the eye. This ancient work, languishing in British Museum archives since the 19th century, is preserved on several large cuneiform manuscripts from the royal library of Ashurbanipal, from the 7th century BC. The longest surviving ancient work on diseased eyes, the text predates by several centuries corresponding Hippocratic treatises. The Nineveh series represents a systematic array of eye symptoms and therapies, also showing commonalities with Egyptian and Greco-Roman medicine. Since scholars of Near Eastern civilizations and ancient and general historians of medicine will need to be familiar with this material, the volume makes this aspect of Babylonian medicine fully accessible to both specialists and non-specialists, with all texts being fully translated into English.

The monograph Signs from Silence: Ur of the first Sumerians tells the story of the Sumerian city of Ur at the beginning of the third pre-Christian millennium (c. 2,900–2,700). In terms of research focusing on the emergence of one of the first statehood foci of human history—the pristine state of ancient Mesopotamia—, the author takes up evidence on a critical phase of early Mesopotamian social development. At the beginning of the third pre-Christian millennium, the men and women of Ur took up actions that decided whether the material and spiritual heritage of the preceding Late Uruk cultural-development phase (c. 3,500–3,200), when the first state, organized religion, sciences and the arts had emerged in ancient Mesopotamia, will stand up to the test of time, or whether it will vanish into thin air, as it happened in other civilizational complexes. The author has based his conclusions on the testimony of written texts, archaeology and iconography. Guided by this evidence, he portrays the ways and means by which the men and women of Ur treated the material and spiritual heritage of the Late Uruk civilization. Their activities defined the coordinates system within which the early Mesopotamian state subsequently developed through the nearly three millennia of its existence.