Browse results

Prayer in the Ancient World is the resource on prayer in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean. With over 350 entries it showcases a robust selection of the range of different types of prayers attested from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia, the Levant, early Judaism and Christianity, Greece, Rome, Arabia, and Iran, enhanced by critical commentary.

The Prayer in the Ancient World will also be available online.

Preview of the 'Prayer in the Ancient World’, 2022
Author:
Delve into Ezekiel’s tumultuous world, discovering his role as YHWH’s מוֹפֵת, a unique ‘sign’, among many others, and a divine communicator. Does the Exile’s trauma find an ‘ameliorating’ perspective through Ezekiel’s symbolic actions and identity? From temple absence to YHWH’s ‘glory’ departure, from loss and prohibited grief to intermittent mutism, is Ezekiel a response to a communication crisis between YHWH and Israel? Uncover how מוֹפֵת’s elusive meaning sheds light on Ezekiel’s role as an ‘embodiment’ of YHWH’s presence, a bridge in YHWH’s intricate relationship with Israel. Through meticulous exegesis and linguistic-theological analysis, you will experience afresh Ezekiel’s narrative and theology.
Volume Editor:
This book spins around the convening idea of variability to offer fourteen new views into the Pyramid and Coffin Texts and related materials that overarch archaeology, philology, linguistics, writing studies, religious studies and social history by applying innovative approaches such as agency, politeness, material philology and object-based studies, and under a strong empirical focus. In this book, you will find from a previously unpublished coffin or a reinterpretation of the so-called ‘Letters to the Dead’ to graffiti’s interaction with monumental inscriptions, ‘subatomic’ studies in the spellings of the Osiris’ name or the puzzles of text transmission, among other novel topics.
Volume 24 of the Israel Oriental Studies Annual includes eight articles. The Ancient Near Eastern section consists of five articles. Four deal with Hittite and Anatolian subjects (Burgin, Gilan, Cohen and Hawkins); one discusses the “Laws of Hazor” text fragment and its relationship to other cuneiform law collections (Darabi). The Semitic section includes three articles. The first is the second instalment of Etymogical Investigations on Jibbali/Śḥerέt Anthroponyms (Castagna and Al-'amri). The second article is a discussion of the relationship between Ethiopian Semitic languages and ancient Egyptian (Cerqueglini). Sealing the Semitic section and volume 24 is a study of spoken Ashkenazic Hebrew among Hassidic communities (Yampolskaya et al.).
This book investigates archaisms and innovations in Tocharian nominal morphology: it provides a comprehensive treatment of the morphology of Tocharian grammatical gender, describing how it historically derived from the Indo-European proto-language and why it typologically deviates from most of the other Indo-European languages. The approach is both synchronic and diachronic, with a heavier focus on diachrony. The volume features a thorough study of a large number of nominal classes and pronominal forms, which are analysed from a derivational and an inflectional point of view in order to clarify their origin and development from the perspective of Indo-European comparative reconstruction. With its wide coverage of intricate phonological and morphological patterns, The Tocharian Gender System is an important contribution to the study of Tocharian nominal morphology as a whole.
The Close, the Distant, and the Known
In this volume, Maxim N. Kupreyev explores the intricate stories of Egyptian-Coptic demonstratives and adverbs, personal, relative pronouns and definite articles. Applying the concepts of distance, contrast, and joint attention, the book offers a panorama of competing deictic systems in Old Kingdom Egypt. It singles out dialectal differences and outlines the history of deixis not as a linear development, but as a competition of regional variants that gradually attain normative status. The results of the study reconsider the evolution of Ancient Egyptian, its periodization and its embedding in the Afro-Asiatic linguistic context.
Text and Context in Ancient Egypt. Studies in Honor of James P. Allen
In the House of Heqanakht: Text and Context in Ancient Egypt gathers Egyptological articles in honor of James P. Allen, Charles Edwin Wilbour Professor of Egyptology at Brown University. Professor Allen's contribution to our current understanding of the ancient Egyptian language, religion, society, and history is immeasurable and has earned him the respect of generations of scholars. In accordance with Professor Allen’s own academic prolificity, the present volume represents an assemblage of studies that range among different methodologies, objects of study, and time periods. The contributors specifically focus on the interconnectedness of text and context in ancient Egypt, exploring how a symbiosis of linguistics, philology, archaeology, and history can help us reconstruct a more accurate picture of ancient Egypt and its people.

The Figshare images in this volume have been made available online and can be accessed at https://figshare.com/s/8b3e5ad9f8a374885949
The IOS Annual volume 22: “Telling of Olden Kings” brings forth studies devoted to a wide array fields and disciplines of the Middle East. The Ancient Near East section is devoted to Neo-Babylonian Mesopotamia and the Achaemenid Empire (Da Riva and Novotny; Levavi; Tavernier and Azzoni; Zadok). The Semitic section includes three articles dealing with contact between various languages of the Semitic language group and between Semitic languages and dialects and other language groups (Castagna; Cerqueglini; Klimiuk and Lipnicka). The Arabic section contains two articles two articles about Modern Iraqi and Egyptian Poetry (Khoury) and the image of Rahav the harlot in early Muslim traditions (Yavor).
The IOS Annual volume 23: “Drought Will Drive You Even Toward Your Foe” brings forth studies devoted to a wide array fields and disciplines of the Middle East. The two sections – Ancient Near East and Semitics include six articles. The Ancient Near East contains three articles dealing with the history of Mesopotamia and ancient Syria (Steinkeller; Steinmayer; Cohen), and the second and concluding part of “On Aramaic Loanwords in Neo- and Late Babylonian Texts” (Zadok), which appeared in IOS 21. The Semitic section includes two articles. The first is about metaphors in the Bedouins' Poetry (Cerqueglini). The second is a study of the vocalization of guttural consonants in the Secunda (Maurizio)
A Description and Quantitative Analysis of Linguistic Variation
This work focuses the social context of writing in ancient Western Arabia in the oasis of ancient Dadan, modern-day al-ʿUlā in the northwest of the Arabian Peninsula between the sixth to first centuries BC. It offers a description and analysis of the language of the inscriptions and the variation attested within them. It is the first work to perform a systematic study of the linguistic variation of the Dadanitic inscriptions. It combines a thorough description of the language of the inscriptions with a statistical analysis of the distribution of variation across different textual genres and manners of inscribing. By considering correlations between language-internal and extralinguistic features this analysis aims to take a more holistic approach to the epigraphic object. Through this approach an image of a rich writing culture emerges, in which we can see innovation as well as the deliberate use of archaic linguistic features in more formal text types.