The Inscription

This is the first complete translation and commentary on the important tableau and inscription of Queen Katimala/Karimala at Semna. Proper understanding of the paleography, grammar, and content reveals Katimala to have been a Nubian ruler at the time of the Twenty-First to Twenty-Second Dynasties of Ancient Egypt. She emerges as a political and military leader who took control of at least Lower Nubia in the wake of failed military activities on the part of a male predecessor. Katimala's inscription is not illegible, as has often been stated, but is a well-composed Lower Nubian example of a politico-religious manifesto applying many of the conventions of early Egyptian literary and historical compositions.

Why would an inkstone have a poem inscribed on it? Early modern Chinese writers did not limit themselves to working with brushes and ink, and their texts were not confined to woodblock-printed books or the boundaries of the paper page. Poets carved lines of verse onto cups, ladles, animal horns, seashells, walking sticks, boxes, fans, daggers, teapots, and musical instruments. Calligraphers left messages on the implements ordinarily used for writing on paper. These inscriptions—terse compositions in verse or epigrammatic prose—relate in complex ways to the objects on which they are written. Thomas Kelly develops a new account of the relationship between Chinese literature and material culture by examining inscribed objects from the late Ming and early to mid-Qing dynasties. He considers how the literary qualities of inscriptions interact with the visual and physical properties of the things that bear them. Kelly argues that inscribing an object became a means for authors to grapple with the materiality and technologies of writing. Facing profound social upheavals, from volatility in the marketplace to the violence of dynastic transition, writers turned to inscriptions to reflect on their investments in and dependence on the permanence of the written word. Shedding new light on cultures of writing in early modern China, The Inscription of Things broadens understandings of the links between the literary and the material.

The Oldest Known Writing in Siamese: The Inscription of Phra Ram Khamhæng of Sukhothai is a translation of the Ram Khamhaeng Inscription provided by an American English-language scholar Cornelius Beach Bradley. The original inscription is generally credited to Ram Khamhaeng, the king of the Sukhothai Kingdom. The inscription is dated back to 1292 and deals with the personal history of the king, the praise of his deeds and the reach of his kingdom, and the rules and customs established in Sukhotai.

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Jeremy Smoak presents a synthesis of recent discoveries bearing upon the early history and function of the biblical priestly blessing of Numbers 6:24-26. The book gives special focus to the importance of the discovery of the blessing on two silver amulets from Jerusalem dating to the late Iron Age and several other Iron Age inscriptions containing parallels to the blessing. The analysis of the inscriptions provides a new way to approach the meaning and significance of the instructions for the blessing in the biblical book of Numbers.

Recognizing the traditional place held by the Hekatompedon Inscription (IG I3 4) in classical studies, this book presents evidence for the meaning of the inscription that comes from its facture, leading to the question of the origin of the stoikhedon style and of Egypt's role in that emergence.