Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum – författare

The emergence of complex writing systems in Mesopotamia and Egypt enabled the creation of vast textual traditions spanning administration, medicine, law, religion, literature, and political life. The preservation and transmission of these materials required highly trained specialists working within courts, temples, and other institutions. In the activities of these specialists—collecting, copying, interpreting, and curating texts—we can observe the earliest foundations of philology, the disciplined engagement with written knowledge that underlies all scholarly traditions.Drawing on a wide range of primary sources from around 3000 BCE to the first centuries CE, this book offers the first comparative history of philology in Egypt and Mesopotamia. It takes a holistic approach to their written legacies, examining methods, practices, scholarly roles, and institutional settings alongside the material forms of texts themselves. By analyzing written evidence together with objects and material culture, it reconstructs a dynamic repertoire of techniques for composing, studying, interpreting, and transmitting knowledge—procedures that became fundamental principles of philology thereafter.The Dawn of Philology—originally published in German in 2018 and updated and presented here in English translation—is an important and accessible contribution to the literature on the origins of writing and scholarship. It will be essential for specialists in Assyriology and Egyptology, as well as for readers interested in the history of knowledge and scholarly disciplines.

The emergence of complex writing systems in Mesopotamia and Egypt enabled the creation of vast textual traditions spanning administration, medicine, law, religion, literature, and political life. The preservation and transmission of these materials required highly trained specialists working within courts, temples, and other institutions. In the activities of these specialists—collecting, copying, interpreting, and curating texts—we can observe the earliest foundations of philology, the disciplined engagement with written knowledge that underlies all scholarly traditions.Drawing on a wide range of primary sources from around 3000 BCE to the first centuries CE, this book offers the first comparative history of philology in Egypt and Mesopotamia. It takes a holistic approach to their written legacies, examining methods, practices, scholarly roles, and institutional settings alongside the material forms of texts themselves. By analyzing written evidence together with objects and material culture, it reconstructs a dynamic repertoire of techniques for composing, studying, interpreting, and transmitting knowledge—procedures that became fundamental principles of philology thereafter.The Dawn of Philology—originally published in German in 2018 and updated and presented here in English translation—is an important and accessible contribution to the literature on the origins of writing and scholarship. It will be essential for specialists in Assyriology and Egyptology, as well as for readers interested in the history of knowledge and scholarly disciplines.

The ancient Near East is a construct defined by present-day scientific investigations, a construct whose temporal and spatial boundaries are fuzzy, constantly shifting under the weight of new empirical data and increasingly sophisticated analytical methods. Its objects of investigation, even those that have resided in museum collections for generations, are in flux, as the profound cultural, geographical, ethnic and social diversity of the ancient Near East threatens to drown out any points of commonality. Yet it is these points of commonality that draw us inevitably to questions of Diversity and Standardization as categories for cross-cultural and trans-historical analysis. As we look across the variegated horizons of antiquity, do these categories have any real analytical power? For instance, the introduction of a new system of measurement or bookkeeping technique or even the imposition of a standardized repertoire of pottery forms on a more-or-less subject population are all examples of the real power of processes of standardization to stabilize territorial political entities. The problem must be posed for the ancient Near East at an even more fundamental level, however: what role do concepts, methods of standardization and, more generally, sign systems play in the reconfiguration and reconstitution of cultural, political, religious, scientific and social spaces? This volume results from a symposium under the aegis of the TOPOI Research Cluster (a trans-disciplinary research center devoted to the investigation of the interdependencies between space and knowledge in the ancient world) that brought together leading archaeologists, philologists, historians and linguists in order to investigate concrete historical examples that speak to questions of Diversity and Standardization in the ancient Near East.

Lange Zeit galt Schrift als aufgeschriebene mündliche Sprache. Doch was geschieht, wenn eine mathematische Gleichung gelöst und Musik mit Noten komponiert wird, wenn ein Autor an seinem Text feilt, die Konkrete Poesie ein Schriftspiel entfaltet, der genetische Code als Buchstabenfolge sequenziert wird, der Kabbalist Buchstaben permutiert oder der Informatiker ein Computerprogramm schreibt? Schriften sind mehr als Aufschreibsysteme für Gesprochenes; stets bergen sie lautsprachenneutrale Aspekte. Der Begriff "Schriftbildlichkeit" zielt auf einen Perspektivenwechsel: die Überwindung eines phonographisch reduzierten und eurozentrisch verengten Schriftkonzeptes. Jenseits der Dichotomie von Sprache und Bild vereinigen sich in Schriften diskursive und ikonische Merkmale – und das gilt für alphabetische wie nichtalphabetische Schriften. Schriften eröffnen Experimentierräume der kognitiven wie der ästhetischen Erfahrung. In den Beiträgen dieses programmatischen Eröffnungsbandes der neuen Buchreihe "Schriftbildlichkeit" werden explorative und kreative Leistungen von Schriften im Wechselverhältnis ihrer Sichtbarkeit und Handhabbarkeit in wissenschaftlichen und künstlerischen, in alltäglichen, spielerischen und religiösen Schriftpraktiken zutage gefördert.