Search results for "Mesopotamia"

Miti, culti, saperi. Per un'antropologia religiosa della Mesopotamia antica

2021

The theoretical and methodological approaches of Cultural and Social Anthropology have long since become indispensable for the study of classical antiquity, so much so that we can speak of a Historical Anthropology of the Ancient World. On the contrary, the dialogue between historians and philologists on the one hand and anthropologists, on the other hand, has been less developed concerning the cultures of the ancient Near East. There are several reasons for this lack of dialogue, the most important of which is the fact that the multilingual cuneiform textual corpus is still largely unpublished and characterized by philological difficulties that make it inaccessible to non-specialists. This…

Reasoning with Vague Spatial Information from Upper Mesopotamia (2000BC)

2015

International audience; Concepts such as near, far, south of, etc., are by its own nature vague. However, they are quite common in human language. In the case of historical records, these concepts are often the only source of information regarding the position of ancient places whose exact location has been lost. In our research, we use digitized written records from Upper Mesopotamia (2000BC) from the HIGEOMES project. Our goal is to provide better understanding of the location of places, based on the analysis of spatial statements. In our approach, we analyse cardinal statements between places with known location. Using this information we construct a probabilistic function representing t…

Conceptual Metaphors and Social Action. Divine Sex as Political-Economic and Gender Paradigm in Ancient Mesopotamia

2023

Divine love is the central theme of many ancient Mesopotamian compositions. Both Sumerian and Akkadian texts poetically describe the love and sexual relationship between gods. The object of this study is to analyse, through a gender and anthropological perspective, the metaphorical language used to describe divine love relationships, focusing on the use of images from agriculture, pastoralism, and the plant world. Such metaphors contribute to the creation and at the same time to the reinforcement of a sexual imaginary, not only divine but also human. Divine sexuality and the metaphors used to describe it become, over the millennia, paradigms for understanding and thinking about human sexual…

Leggere il rituale con Rappaport. La cerimonia mesopotamica del mīs pî da una prospettiva ecologica

2021

Conclusions: Late Chalcolithic Northern Mesopotamia. Setting the Agenda in the Debate on the Rise of Urbanization in the Ancient Near East

2022

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Quando Gilgameš taglia i “cedri”. Gli alberi nell’immaginario mitologico mesopotamico

2021

In the Sumerian and Akkadian mythological literature, the ruler of the city of Uruk, Gilgameš, uproots and/or cuts down trees on several occasions: the ḫalub-tree (mahaleb cherry) linked to the goddess Inanna and the eren (juniper)/erēnu (cedar) trees of the Forest guarded by Ḫuwawa. These trees should be understood as elements of a wider "wilderness", with which they share a powerful and ambiguous ontological otherness, as opposed to the city and the country of Sumer. In order to become useful, this otherness must be conducted in the city and subject to processes of organization. This article illustrates the symbolic implications of the uprooting, cutting down and subsequent transport of t…