Peled 2019 - Categorization and Hierarchy - Animals in the Hittite World (original) (raw)
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2019
While Human-Animal Studies is a rapidly growing field in modern history, studies on this topic that focus on the Ancient World are few. The present volume aims at closing this gap. It investigates the relation between humans, animals, gods, and things with a special focus on the structure of these categories. An improved understanding of the ancient categories themselves is a precondition for any investigation into the relation between them. The focus of the volume lies on the Ancient Near East, but it also provides studies on Ancient Greece, Asia Minor, Mesoamerica, the Far East, and Arabia.
Animals and their Relation to Gods, Humans and Things in the Ancient World
Universal- und kulturhistorische Studien. Studies in Universal and Cultural History, 2019
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Dog-men, Bear-men, and the Others: Men acting as Animals in Hittite Festival Texts
published in: L. Recht and C. Tsouparopoulou (eds), Fierce lions, angry mice and fat-tailed sheep: Animal encounters in the ancient Near East, 2021, pp. 79-94, https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/328721
The Fox in Enki and Ninhursaĝa Dumuzi and the Fly Lugalbanda and Anzu Ninurta and the Anzu's chick Inanna, Šukaletuda, and the Raven Conclusions: magical helpers and the metamorphosis human-animal Chapter 3 Canines from inside and outside the city: of dogs, foxes and wolves in conceptual spaces in Sumero-Akkadian texts 23 Andréa Vilela Canines from the 'inside': dogs Canines from the 'in-between': stray dogs Canines from the outside: wolves and foxes Conclusion Chapter 4 A human-animal studies approach to cats and dogs in ancient Egypt: evidence from mummies, iconography and epigraphy 31 Marina Fadum & Carina Gruber Human-cat relationships in ancient Egypt: the cat as an animal mummy Human-canine relationships in ancient Egypt: the dog as companion animal Conclusion Part II Animals in ritual and cult Chapter 5 Encountered animals and embedded meaning: the ritual and roadside fauna of second millennium Anatolia 39 Neil Erskine Deleuze, Guattari, and reconstructing ancient understanding Landscape, religion, and putting meaning in place Creatures, cult, and creating meaning Folding animals in ritual Bulls, boars, birds Folding animals on the road Human-animal interactions Conclusion vi Chapter 6 The dogs of the healing goddess Gula in the archaeological and textual record of ancient Mesopotamia 55 Seraina Nett The dogs of Gula in Mesopotamian art The Isin dog cemetery The dogs of Gula in Ur III documentary sources Conclusion
2023_Animal Categorization in Mesopotamia and the Origins of Natural Philosophy
SEEN NOT HEARD COMPOSITION, ICONICITY, AND THE CLASSIFIER SYSTEMS OF LOGOSYLLABIC SCRIPT, 2023
Since antiquity, and especially since Aristotle,11 the categorization of animals has beenrepeatedly attempted in Western scholarly tradition. Etymologically, the word animal itself preserves the idea of something possessing a soul/breath (anima), an important characteristic shared by humans and animals. Categorization is always the result of reasoning. From a pragmatic point of view, the underlying deductive reasoning process is mostly covert. Nevertheless, such classes often show, especially at their fringes, variations that make the underlying reasoning/categorization explicit—“philosophical”—thus proving that categorization is not fixed but dynamic. To a lesser extent, this also holds true for classification and is probably the reason why the terms “classification” and “categorization” are often used indistinctly. In contrast to categorization, the processes of classification appear more or less automated from the point of view of linguistics. In this sense we may use the term implicit classification, which refers to classifications not further questioned at a given time and place.
Defining the Hittite “Pantheon”, its Hierarchy and Circles: Methodological Perspectives
Studia Asiana 14, 2023
For the Hittite religion of the “Thousand Gods of Ḫatti” the scholarship has identified different ways of categorization: State pantheon, Local cults, “circle” and numeric group are the most widely used categories based on several criteria, such as linguistics, geography, and cultural milieu. The present paper aims to better define the state of the question about the hierarchy within the Hittite pantheon on the one hand, and to further investigate the notion of “circle” in the Hittite religion on the other, whose analysis has raised some questions and has led to different interpretations.
Hittite Ritual Animal Sacrifice: Integrating Zooarchaeology and Textual Analysis
In 2008, the disarticulated remains of a young male sheep skeleton deposited within a small Late Bronze Age pit were recovered at Kilise Tepe in south-central Turkey approximately 40 km inland from the Mediterranean coast. The pit, which exclusively contained the sheep skeleton, was located within a building whose size, design and artifactual contents indicate it was associated with ritual activity. The lack of disturbance to the pit and excellent state of preservation of the bones suggest elements that are missing were not originally deposited. The carcass was thoroughly dismembered, disarticulated and filleted prior to deposition. Contextual analysis of these skeletal remains provides a significant opportunity to move beyond the limits of textual analysis when studying Hittite animal sacrifice. By demonstrating the benefits of zooarchaeological analysis conducted in a context-specific fashion this paper offers the beginnings of a methodology for Anatolian specialists interested in examining ritual behaviour. More than a simple case study, this article combines two separate strands of archaeological evidence to investigate the complex issue of Hittite animal sacrifice.
Workshop: Assyriology and Anthropology (Chairs: Lorenzo Verderame and Emanuel Pfoh). Power, politics, and identities emerge in relations. Anthropologists continue to this day to critique the discourse of human (usually male) as a stand-in for all of personkind by crosscutting this construct with investigations of race, class, gender, and sexuality. In the recent ‘animal turn’, however, anthropologists have extended the site of their investigations to study relations that are constituted through multi-species. Human-animal entanglements and relatedness have allowed researchers to further the feminist critique of the ties between kinship and biology, and the current state of knowledge destabilises the anthropocentric discourse that has plagued most of the writings even beyond the discipline of anthropology proper. But can these frameworks be fruitfully used by Assyriologists? Ancient Mesopotamian archaeological remains in general, and Neo-Assyrian sources in particular, reveal that multi-species relations were central to the discourse of power and politics and their involvement with the construction of gender. In this paper, I would like to shift attention from the (often asymmetrical) human relations frequently discussed in studies of imperial ideology, to the human-animal entanglements for the construction of imperial masculinities. I aim to show that one of the elements for the proper (that is, legitimate) exercise of rule was precisely the refusal to abstract the figure of the sovereign not only from its relatedness to other life forms. The central logic of the paper will address the question of whether the anthropological ‘animal turn’ might provide a means through which we could make sense of the human-animal entanglement in the Neo-Assyrian royal textual and visual culture. I propose to analyse the royal epithets, the hunting texts, the palatial reliefs, and the royal glyptic in order to tease out the contradictory logic that emerges from this multi-species relatedness as it cross-cuts with the search for a sovereign identity in imperial discourse. At the same time, and in order to redress the balance, I also seek to address the emic ontology of animality.
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Animal agents in Sumerian literature
L. Recht - C. Tsouparopoulou, Fierce lions, angry mice and fat-tailed sheep: Animal encounters in the ancient Near East, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, 2021