Uruk Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of Uruk book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.
The Cults of Uruk and Babylon by Marc J. H. Linssen Pdf
This publication provides new information about the temple ritual texts from ancient Mesopotamia, in particular from the cities Uruk and Babylon, and shows how important the public cults were in Hellenistic times, at least until the first century B.C.
Uruk by Nicola Crüsemann,Margarete van Ess,Markus Hilgert,Beate Salje,Timothy Potts Pdf
This abundantly illustrated volume explores the genesis and flourishing of Uruk, the first known metropolis in the history of humankind. More than one hundred years ago, discoveries from a German archaeological dig at Uruk, roughly two hundred miles south of present-day Baghdad, sent shock waves through the scholarly world. Founded at the end of the fifth millennium BCE, Uruk was the main force for urbanization in what has come to be called the Uruk period (4000–3200 BCE), during which small, agricultural villages gave way to a larger urban center with a stratified society, complex governmental bureaucracy, and monumental architecture and art. It was here that proto-cuneiform script—the earliest known form of writing—was developed around 3400 BCE. Uruk is known too for the epic tale of its hero-king Gilgamesh, among the earliest masterpieces of world literature. Containing 480 images, this volume represents the most comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of the archaeological evidence gathered at Uruk. More than sixty essays by renowned scholars provide glimpses into the life, culture, and art of the first great city of the ancient world. This volume will be an indispensable reference for readers interested in the ancient Near East and the origins of urbanism.
The Pantheon of Uruk During the Neo-Babylonian Period by Paul-Alain Beaulieu Pdf
This book is about the pantheon of the Babylonian city of Uruk, between the 9th and 5th centuries BC. It is a careful analysis of the archive of the Eanna temple in Uruk, the sanctuary of the goddess Ishtar, containing well over 8,000 cuneiform tablets in the Akkadian language. The tablets date in their majority to the Neo-Babylonian and early Achaemenid period. Paul-Alain Beaulieu sheds light on the hierarchy of the local pantheon, providing a wealth of data concerning the cult of each deity, such as identity and theology, ornaments and clothing of the divine image, offerings ceremonies, temples, and cultic personnel. An important contribution to our knowledge of the functioning of religion in Neo-Babylonian society.
Scholars and Scholarship in Late Babylonian Uruk by Christine Proust,John Steele Pdf
This volume explores how scholars wrote, preserved, circulated, and read knowledge in ancient Mesopotamia. It offers an exercise in micro-history that provides a case study for attempting to understand the relationship between scholars and scholarship during this time of great innovation. The papers in this collection focus on tablets written in the city of Uruk in southern Babylonia. These archives come from two different scholarly contexts. One is a private residence inhabited during successive phases by two families of priests who were experts in ritual and medicine. The other is the most important temple in Uruk during the late Achemenid and Hellenistic periods. The contributors undertake detailed studies of this material to explore the scholarly practices of individuals, the connection between different scholarly genres, and the exchange of knowledge between scholars in the city and scholars in other parts of Babylonia and the Greek world. In addition, this collection examines the archives in which the texts were found and the scribes who owned or wrote them. It also considers the interconnections between different genres of knowledge and the range of activities of individual scribes. In doing so, it answers questions of interest not only for the study of Babylonian scholarship but also for the study of ancient Mesopotamian textual culture more generally, and for the study of traditions of written knowledge in the ancient world.
Uruk: the First City is the first fully historical analysis of the origins of the city and of the state in southern Mesopotamia, the region providing the earliest evidence in world history related to these seminal developments. Contrasting his approach -- which has been influenced by V. Gordan Childe and by Marxist theorywith the neo-evolutionist ideas of (especially) American anthropological theory, the author argues that the innovations that took place during the Uruk period (most of the fourth millennium B.C.) were a true revolution that fundamentally changed all aspects of society and culture. This book is unique in its historical approach and its combination of archaeological and textual sources. It develops an argument that weaves together a vast amount of information and places it within a context of contemporary scholarly debates on such questions as the ancient economy and world systems.It explains the roots of these debates briefly without talking down to the reader. The book is accessible to a wider audience, while it also provides a cogent argument about the processes involved to the specialist in the field.
Most archaeologists and historians of the ancient Near East have focused on the internal transformations that led to the emergence of early cities and states. In The Uruk World System, Guillermo Algaze concentrates on the unprecedented and wide-ranging process of external expansion that coincided with the rapid initial crystallization of Mesopotamian civilization. In this extensive study, he contends that the rise of early Sumerian polities cannot be understood without also taking into account the developments in surrounding peripheral areas. This new edition includes a substantial new chapter that explores recent data and interpretations of the expansion of Uruk settlements across Syro-Mesopotamia.
Author : Gil J. Stein Publisher : University of Arizona Press Page : 224 pages File Size : 44,9 Mb Release : 2022-08-16 Category : Social Science ISBN : 9780816550531
The use of world-systems theory to explain the spread of social complexity has become accepted practice by both historians and archaeologists. Gil Stein now offers the first rigorous test of world systems as a model in archaeology, arguing that the application of world-systems theory to noncapitalist, pre-fifteenth-century societies distorts our understanding of developmental change by overemphasizing the role of external over internal dynamics. In this new study, Stein proposes two complementary theoretical frameworks for the study of interregional interaction: a "distance-parity" model, which views world-systems as simply one factor in a broader range of intersocietal relations, and a "trade-diaspora" model, which explains variation in exchange systems from the perspective of participant groups. He tests his models against the archaeological record of Mesopotamian expansion into the Anatolian highlands during the fourth millennium B.C. Whereas some scholars have considered this "Uruk expansion" to be one of the earliest documented world-systems, Stein uses data from the site of Hacinebi in southeastern Turkey to support his alternate perspective. Comparing economic data from pre- and postcontact phases, Stein shows that the Mesopotamians did not dominate the people of this distant periphery. Such evidence, argues Stein, shows that we must look more closely at the local cultures of peripheries to develop realistic cross-cultural models of variation in colonialism, exchange, and secondary state formation in ancient societies. By demonstrating that a multitude of factors affect the nature and consequences of intersocietal contacts, his book advocates a much-needed balance between recognizing that no society can be understood in complete isolation from its neighbors and assuming the primacy of outside contact in a society's development.
Ur and Uruk by Charles River Charles River Editors Pdf
*Includes pictures *Examines the Sumerians' culture, daily life at the cities, and architecture *Includes ancient accounts describing the cities *Includes a bibliography for further reading In southern Iraq, a crushing silence hangs over the dunes. For nearly 5,000 years, the sands of the Iraqi desert have held the remains of the oldest known civilization: the Sumerians. When American archaeologists discovered a collection of cuneiform tablets in Iraq in the late 19th century, they were confronted with a language and a people who were at the time only scarcely known to even the most knowledgeable scholars of ancient Mesopotamia. The exploits and achievements of other Mesopotamian peoples, such as the Assyrians and Babylonians, were already known to a large segment of the population through the Old Testament and the nascent field of Near Eastern studies had unraveled the enigma of the Akkadian language that was widely used throughout the region in ancient times, but the discovery of the Sumerian tablets brought to light the existence of the Sumerian culture, which was the oldest of all the Mesopotamian cultures. Although the Sumerians continue to get second or even third billing compared to the Babylonians and Assyrians, perhaps because they never built an empire as great as the Assyrians or established a city as enduring and great as Babylon, they were the people who provided the template of civilization that all later Mesopotamians built upon. The Sumerians are credited with being the first people to invent writing, libraries, cities, and schools in Mesopotamia (Ziskind 1972, 34), and many would argue that they were the first people to create and do those things anywhere in world. No site better represents the importance of the Sumerians than the city of Uruk. Between the fourth and the third millennium BCE, Uruk was one of several city-states in the land of Sumer, located in the southern end of the Fertile Crescent, between the two great rivers of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Discovered in the late 19th century by the British archaeologist William Loftus, it is this site that has revealed much of what is now known of the Sumerian, Akkadian, and Neo-Sumerian people. Although Uruk was not the only city that the Sumerians built during the Uruk period, it was by far the greatest and also the source of most of the archeological and written evidence concerning early Sumerian culture (Kuhrt 2010, 1:23). Uruk went from being the world's first major city to the most important political and cultural center in the ancient Near East in relatively quick fashion. Long before Alexandria was a city and even before Memphis and Babylon had attained greatness, the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur stood foremost among ancient Near Eastern cities. Today, the greatness and cultural influence of Ur has been largely forgotten by most people, partially because its monuments have not stood the test of time the way other ancient culture's monuments have. For instance, the monuments of Egypt were made of stone while those of Ur and most other Mesopotamian cities were made of mud brick and as will be discussed in this report, mud-brick may be an easier material to work with than stone but it also decays much quicker. The same is true to a certain extent for the written documents that were produced at Ur. At its height Ur was the center of a great dynasty that controlled most of Mesopotamia directly through a well maintained army and bureaucracy and the areas that were not under its direct control were influenced by Ur's diplomats and religious ideas. Ur was also a truly resilient city because it survived the downfall of the Sumerians, outright destruction at the hands of the Elamites, and later occupations by numerous other peoples, which included Saddam Hussein more recently.