How to Classify Pigs: Old Babylonian and Middle Babylonian Lexical Texts (original) (raw)
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2023_Animal Categorization in Mesopotamia and the Origins of Natural Philosophy
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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.
Animals Lists in the 3rd Millennium
Many of the aspects of Mesopotamian lexicography elude us. This is apparent, in particular, when dealing with the earliest evidence from the South Mesopotamian site Uruk, modern Warkā. Whereas the language of the archaic lists is still undetermined to some degree, 1 the lack of any context except for the fact that a majority of lexemes occur within a thematic framework, pose many problems in their interpretation. It is not until the early second half of the third millennium that the unilingual lexical texts receive, on a horizontal level, Semitic translations or equivalents. 2 About 12 per cent of the textual material dating to the archaic period was assigned to the lexical text genre. 3 The editors of the archaic lexical texts from Uruk and the slightly later archaic texts from Ur included every text that did not fulfil criteria, which * The text sigla used throughout this overview, follow to a great extent, recent conventions. For an incomplete list regarding the Early Dynastic evidence see [Civil ]: viii-ix. For convenience and clarification the sigla are listed here in alphabetical order: ArLu-A = Archaic Lu2 A; ArO = Archaic Officials; ArC = Archaic Cities; ArGe = Archaic Geography X; ArA-A = Archaic Animals A; ArFi = Archaic Fish; ArB-A = Archaic Birds A; ArS = Archaic Swine; ArPG = Archaic Pots and Garments; ArFo = Archaic Food ; ArM = Archaic Metals; ArW = Archaic Wood ; ArWL-C = Archaic Word List C; EDLu-A = Early Dynastic Lu2 A; EDLu-E = Early Dynastic Lu2 E; EDO = Early Dynastic Officials; EDP = Early Dynastic Plants; EDA-A = Early Dynastic Animals A; EDA-B = Early Dynastic Animals B; EDFi = Early Dynastic Fish; EDB-A = Early Dynastic Birds A; EDB-B = Early Dynastic Birds B; EDPG = Early Dynastic Pots and Garments; EDFo = Early Dynastic Food ; EDWL-C (ad-gi4) = Early Dynastic Word List C; EDWL-F = Early Dynastic Word List F; EDPV-A = Early Dynastic Practical Vocabulary A; EDPV-B2 = Early Dynastic Practical Vocabulary B2; ESL = Ebla "Sign-list"; VE = Vocabolario di Ebla.
Animals are often mentioned as ingredients in the medical cuneiform tablets. This paper summarizes several aspects implied by the study of Fauna in the frame of Mesopotamian medicine. It consists of a brief introduction, focusing on three main aspects: firstly, what we find in the Assyro-Babylonian medical texts regarding animals; then, we will make a short presentation of the Decknamen theorie, which assumes that some animal names could in fact designate plants. The consequences of such a hypothesis are examined along with our methods to prove or disprove this theory on a case-by-case study; finally, we will state preliminary conclusions about the use of animals and their products in the Assyro-Babylonian medicine.
Introduction: Comparing Animal Lexica in Ancient Cultures
Altorientalische Forschungen, 2019
The present collection of essays goes back to a mini-conference that was organized in October 2017 at the University of Lausanne. The purpose of the conference was to gather scholars working on animal lexica in various fields of the ancient Mediterranean and Western Asian world in order to compare the nature of their sources, the methodological issues they face, and the strategies they have developed in order to address these issues. Overall, animal lexicography is relevant for the study of ancient societies in three main respects. Firstly, the animal lexicon constitutes a significant area in the study of ancient languages 1 and also raises specific linguistic issues, since animal names (or zoonyms), like the names of plants and minerals, often belong to a fairly specialized lexicon. Secondly, the study and identification of zoonyms is also a key element in reconstructing the cultural history of animals in ancient societies. Thirdly, since animal lexica are cultural constructs, they also have the potential to illuminate larger aspects of the anthropology of these societies, such as the relationship between animals and space, the conceptualization of wild versus domestic, as well as the construal of complex relationships between humans and animals (including the metaphorical use of zoonyms for humans), among others. Animal lexica have been the subject of several previous studies, which have tended to develop in two directions mainly. Especially in the context of the Western Asian world, lexical and semantic research on zoonyms usually involves a broad range of comparative materials, although it often focuses on the philological and linguistic levels and does not necessarily discuss the larger historical and cultural implications of the analysis of zoonyms in ancient societies. 2 On the other hand, several studies have addressed zoonyms within the context of a social, cultural and anthropological history of the ancient world, but have usually focused on one cultural area in particular, mainly Greece and Rome, 3 but also Egypt 4 and Western Asia. 5 An approach which integrates these social, cultural and anthropological aspects of zoonyms within a larger comparative perspective remains largely a scholarly desideratum, and the conference was meant to be a first step in that direction.
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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
Categorizing reptiles in Ancient Egypt: an overview of methods
Anthropozoologica 55, 2020
This work aims to present an overview of the methods that can be used to understand the categorization of reptiles in ancient Egyptian culture. Firstly, the widespread practice of using determinatives (classifiers) is here applied to the case of a fragment from the temple of Djedkara, where the word ḥfȝ.w is written with the classifier of the lizard. It is suggested that ḥfȝ.w has been not be used to indicate a snake here, but rather a similar reptile. The second part makes comparison between lists, which were a way to organize and summarize knowledge. Two texts are here presented in order to better understand the possible clusters and hierarchization of snakes: the Brooklyn papyrus 47.218.48 and .85 (Traité d’ophiologie) edited by Sauneron, which contained in its first part a list of snakes with their description, and the section about snakes in the Theriaká of Nicander of Colophone, which permits a cultural comparison with the Greek world regarding the organizing principles of the reptile world. Finally, a statistical study then presented which analyses Egyptian words meaning “snakes” (jm.j-tȝ, fnṯ, sȝ-tȝ, ḥfȝ.w, ḏdf.t), as found across different time periods and genres of text, which attempts to establish the specific field of use of each word.
Partial Persons, Unsafe Spaces: The Babylonian Production of Class through Laws about Animals (2021)
Animals and the Law in Antiquity, ed. Olyan & Rosenblum, 2021
This essay engages two overlapping questions about the legal treatments of animals in law collections from Mesopotamia’s Old Babylonian period (ca. 2000–1600 BCE).1 The first question focuses on the spaces in which animals were known according to law; the second looks at the principles of proportional value by which animals were positioned relative to people. I argue that the symbolic marginality and proportionality of animals to people, in spatial and social terms, discursively grounded broader state claims about the scalarity of political subjectivity for all actors as “natural facts.”
Pigs and the pastoral bias: The other animal economy in northern Mesopotamia (3000–2000 BCE)
Discussion of the animal economy in Mesopotamia has been subject to a persistent, pastoral bias. Most general treatments assume that the Early Bronze Age (ca. 3000–2000 BCE) animal economy was dominated by the herding of sheep and goats. An examination of the abundant written evidence would support such a contention. Zooarchaeological evidence from northern Mesopotamia, however, clearly demonstrates that pigs played a major role in the diet, despite their virtual absence in the written record. In this paper, we attempt to lay bare and correct for the pastoral bias by reviewing the relatively meager written evidence for pig husbandry and by examining the zooarchaeological evidence for pigs from two angles. First, we use relative abundance data from sites across northern Mesopotamia to demonstrate the ubiquity of pigs and to identify regional-and site-level patterning in pig consumption. Second, we use a series of proxy techniques to reconstruct pig husbandry practices at three sites: Tell 'Atij, Tell al-Raqa'i, and Tell Leilan. Ultimately, we argue that this ''other " animal economy emerged to fill a niche opened up by the twin processes of urbanization and institutional expansion. For households struggling to deal with the impacts of these wide-ranging transformations, pigs offered an alternative means of subsistence and perhaps a way of maintaining some degree of autonomy.