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Babylonian medicine is the most important corpus of ancient medicine prior to the Greeks. This volume provides a comprehensive picture of how gasrtrointestinal illness, jaundice and related fevers, as well as diarrhea were treated in ancient Mesopotamia. The editions include transliterations, straightforward translations and essential commentary, and are divided into three main sections: the standard corpus for the treatment of gastrointestinal illness in Royal Library in Nineveh (otherwise know...

Pagan Resurrection puts forward a fascinating and controversial idea - namely that it is the pagan god Odin and not Christ who is the single most important spiritual influence in western civilisation. Far from being just a New Age fad, paganism is fast becoming a major spiritual, intellectual, ecological and political force across the globe. Rudgley is an Oxford trained anthropologist and critically acclaimed author of Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age, who has since presented three series on...

Papers collected in this volume try to illuminate various aspects of philosophical theology dealt with by different Jewish and early Christian authors and texts (e.g. the Acts of the Apostles, Philo, Origen, Gregory of Nazianzus), rooted in and influenced by the Hellenistic religious, cultural, and philosophical context, and they also focus on the literary and cultural traditions of Hellenized Judaism and its reception (e.g. Sibylline Oracles, Prayer of Manasseh), including material culture ("El...

Biblical scholars frequently attempt to contextualize the Priestly ritual corpus by comparing it to other ancient Near Eastern ritual traditions. This comparative approach tends to detect a hidden polemic at work in the Priestly Source (P) which was meant to highlight its distinctly monotheistic outlook. Isabel Cranz reframes current understandings of P by comparing Priestly rituals of atonement to their Assyro-Babylonian counterparts. In this way she shows how the Priestly ritual corpus is high...

What happens to us when we die? What might the afterlife look like? For the ancient Greeks, the dead lived on, overseen by Hades in the Underworld. We read of famous sinners, such as Sisyphus, forever rolling his rock, and the fierce guard dog Kerberos, who was captured by Herakles. For mere mortals, ritual and religion offered possibilities for ensuring a happy existence in the beyond, and some of the richest evidence for beliefs about death comes from southern Italy, where the local Italic peo...

This volume assembles more than 30 articles focusing on the visual, material, and environmental arts of the Ancient Near East. Specific case studies range temporally from the fourth millennium up to the Hellenistic period and geographically from Iran to the eastern Mediterranean. Contributions apply innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to archaeological evidence and critically examine the historiography of the discipline itself. Not intended to be comprehensive, the volume instea...

This volume brings together a variety of approaches to the different ways in which the role of animals was understood in ancient Greco-Roman myth and religion, across a period of several centuries, from Preclassical Greece to Late Antique Rome. Animals in Greco-Roman antiquity were thought to be intermediaries between men and gods, and they played a pivotal role in sacrificial rituals and divination, the foundations of pagan religion. The studies in the first part of the volume examine the role...

Sigmund Mowinckel (1884-1965), der seit 1917 als Dozent, seit 1922 als Professor fur das Alte Testament an der Universitat Oslo tatig war, gilt als einer der bedeutendsten und einflussreichsten Alttestamentler des 20. Jahrhunderts. Sigurd Hjelde zeichnet zunachst seine Biographie nach, vor allem seine akademische Entwicklungsgeschichte bis hin zur Promotion (1916), und vermittelt im zweiten Teil des Buches Einblicke in verschiedene Aspekte seines grossen Lebenswerks. Im Mittelpunkt stehen hier e...

Robert Armour's classic text, long cherished by a generation of readers, is now complemented with more than 50 new photographs and line drawings that show the gods and goddesses in their characteristic forms. Armour maintains a strong narrative thread with illuminating commentary in his lively, vigorous retelling of stories from Egyptian mythology, including those of the sun god Ra, the tragic death and rebirth of Osiris with the help of Isis, the near-burlesque of Horus' battle with the evil S...

Der vorliegende Band legt den Fokus auf kosmologische und kosmogonische Vorstellungen im Corpus Hermeticum und in weiteren, der antiken Hermetik zugerechneten Schriften. Die Beitrage untersuchen den synkretistischen Entstehungsprozess der Schriften und deren Gegenstand und Wirkung im Kontext der antiken Religions- und Philosophiegeschichte. Der Band bundelt dazu in interdisziplinarer Perspektive Beitrage verschiedener Forschungsrichtungen und Wissenschaftsdisziplinen wie u.a. Altphilologie, Theo...