Ancient Languages and Civilizations – serie

Was plurilingualism the exception or the norm in traditional Eurasian scholarship? This volume presents a selection of primary sources—in many cases translated into English for the first time—with introductions that provide fascinating historical materials for challenging notions of the ways in which traditional Eurasian scholars dealt with plurilingualism and monolingualism. Comparative in approach, global in scope, and historical in orientation, it engages with the growing discussion of plurilingualism and focuses on fundamental scholarly practices in various premodern and early modern societies—Chinese, Indian, Mesopotamian, Jewish, Islamic, Ancient Greek, and Roman—asking how these were conceived by the agents themselves. The volume will be an indispensable resource for courses on these subjects and on the history of scholarship and reflection on language throughout the world.

This book approaches the religion and rituals of the pre-Islamic Arabian nomads using the Safaitic inscriptions. Unlike Islamic-period literary sources, this material was produced by practitioners of traditional Arabian religion; the inscriptions are eyewitnesses to the religious life of Arabian nomads prior to the spread of Judaism and Christianity across Arabia. The author attempts to reconstruct this world using the original words of its inhabitants, interpreted through comparative philology, pre-Islamic and Islamic-period literary sources, and the archaeological context.

The songs of the Royal Zhōu (“Zhōu Nán” 周南) and of the Royal Shào (“Shào Nán” 召南) have formed a conceptual unit since at least the late Spring and Autumn period (771–453 BC). With this book Meyer and Schwartz provide a first complete reading of their earliest, Warring States (453–221 BC), iteration as witnessed by the Ānhuī University manuscripts. As a thought experiment, the authors seek to establish an emic reading of these songs, which they contextualise in the larger framework of studies of the Shī (Songs) and of meaning production during the Warring States period more broadly. The analysis casts light on how the Songs were used by different groups during the Warring States period.

This book explores one of the central questions among many disciplines: how communities are formed. It investigates this question through the perspectives of scholar-artist communities in Northern Song China. You will learn how some of the then popular ephemeral artistic practices, such as whisking tea, burning aromatic substances, and playing and listening to qin music, were performed. Through these practices related sensory experiences were generated. The formation process of communities involved many other aspects such as the interplay among people, materials, ephemeral arts, and sensory experiences, which is hard to identify in pure textual sources.

This book focuses on Kalabría as an ancient land of Italy from its origin to the early Middle Ages. The place name referred to the Salento peninsula, also called Messapia, as part of present-day Puglia and later to the land of the Bruttii, now the region of Calabria. This work is the first to carefully evaluate linguistic and historical studies in a comprehensive and monographic form. Following an interdisciplinary approach, the systematic combination of Linguistics and Landscape History guides the research step by step. The sample represents a new significant methodological instance that merges Toponymy, History, Archaeology, Topography, and Philology.

Ever since the early 2nd millennium BCE, Pre-Classical Anatolia has been a crossroads of languages and peoples. Indo-European peoples – Hittites, Luwians, Palaeans – and non-Indo-European ones – Hattians, but also Assyrians and Hurrians – coexisted with each other for extended periods of time during the Bronze Age, a cohabitation that left important traces in the languages they spoke and in the texts they wrote. By combining, in an interdisciplinary fashion, the complementary approaches of linguistics, history, and philology, this book offers a comprehensive, state-of-the-art study of linguistic and cultural contacts in a region that is often described as the bridge between the East and the West.With contributions by Paola Cotticelli-Kurras, Alfredo Rizza, Maurizio Viano, and Ilya Yakubovich.

Since the translation of the Septuagint in the 3rd century BCE, scholars have attempted to identify the stones that populate the biblical text. This study rejects the long-standing reliance on ancient translations for identifying biblical stones. Despite the evident contradictions and historical inconsistencies, scholars traditionally presumed these translations to be reliable. By departing from this approach, this volume presents a novel synthesis of comparative linguistics and archeogemological data. Through rigorous analysis of valid cognates, it establishes correlations between Hebrew stone names and their counterparts in ancient languages, corresponding to known mineral species. This methodological shift enables a more accurate identification of stones mentioned in biblical texts, thus recovering their true historical context. The research not only advances our understanding of biblical mineralogy but also provides a fresh perspective on the material culture of the Ancient Levant, offering valuable insights for scholars and laymen, linguists and archaeologists alike.

Modernization and conversion to world religions are threatening the survival of traditional belief systems, leaving behind only mysterious traces of their existence. This book, based upon extensive research conducted over a period of nearly four decades, brings scientific rigor to one of the questions that have always attracted human curiosity: that of the origin of the dragon.The author demonstrates that both dragons and rainbows are cultural universals, that many of the traits that are attributed to dragons in widely separated parts of the planet are also attributed to rainbows, and that the number and antiquity of such shared traits cannot be attributed to chance or common inheritance, but rather to common cognitive pathways by which human psychology has responded to the natural environment in a wide array of cultures around the world.

Pindar’s Pythian Twelve is the only choral lyric epinicion in our possession composed for the winner of a non-athletic competition. Often regarded as an ode of straightforward interpretation, close analysis of the text reveals that it presents several challenges to modern readers. This book offers an updated translation of the text and an investigation of the main interpretative issues of the epinicion with the aid of historical linguistics. By identifying devices which Pindar might have inherited from earlier periods of poetic language, the study provides insights into the thematic aspects of the ode as well as on Pindar’s compositional technique.

Part 1 of the Festschrift honoring William H. Nienhauser invites readers to explore the fascinating world of ancient Chinese texts through a scholarly lens. The collected articles investigate how already in early times, formerly lost texts were recovered, studied, and edited in order to produce the literature now accessible to us. They analyze how ancient poems inscribed on newly unearthed bamboo slips can be dated according to their rhyme structure and linguistic nuances. And readers will further delve into the vivid accounts of kings and heroes recorded by Sima Qian in his Records of the Grand Historian and gain insights into his personal reflections on figures like Zhang Qian and the developing trade routes between East and West. In sum, this volume provides a comprehensive insight into the rich tapestry of pre-Qin and Han era literature and historiography.

Theories and practices of signification have flourished across space and time. This book examines premodern thinking on signs in ancient Greek philosophy, Chinese divination, Islamic theology, Hebrew epistemology, medieval Latin logic, South Asian language theory, and early modern European artificial languages. Each chapter analyzes and contextualizes key primary sources presented in their original language and English translation, offering rich resources for comparative analysis of approaches to semiosis in religious and scholarly exegesis, prognostication, and the philosophical search for distinctions between natural and artificial signs. The volume brings to light both universal concerns and unique cultural features that shaped the evolution of semiotics.

Inscriptions are often regarded as the ultimate textual ‘originals’ – authentic, authoritative, and unique. This volume challenges that longstanding assumption by showing that formal inscriptions were commonly produced with the help of manuscripts and are, in many cases, copies of preexisting models. Bringing together studies from China, India, Laos, and Siam, the book explores the complex processes of drafting, copying, and transferring texts across a wide range of materials and media. The contributions reveal previously little-known manuscript practices, highlight the tension between fidelity and creativity in inscription-making, and uncover the sociocultural, political, and technological forces at play. Moving beyond the traditional stemmatic approach, this book redefines how we understand epigraphic texts and contributes to current discussions on methodology and terminology in epigraphic research as well as to broader theoretical debates in the fields of philology, textual criticism, and manuscript studies.

Part 2 of the Festschrift dedicated to William H. Nienhauser presents a collection of twelve academic papers that delve into the realms of poetry, fiction, and anecdotal writing from the Tang dynasty onwards. Readers will immerse themselves in the linguistic and literary intricacies of some of the most famous pieces of Tang era poetry, learn to see the city of Beijing through the eyes of a Portuguese explorer of the 16th century, dissect late pictorial depictions of Confucius in classroom settings, and discover how a real event might have inspired four separate Tang narratives to revolve around a female avenger.