This third fascicle of Babylonian Planetary Omens contains the edition of all cuneiform texts dealing with the planet Venus known to us. Most of these tablets are kept in the British Museum; the large number of unpublished texts were transliterated and the previously published texts were checked and collated from the originals. The texts are accompanied by translations, and each group of texts is commented upon by David Pingree from the point of view of the text history and astronomical significance. A general introduction, also by David Pingree, analyzes the descriptions of Venus that occur in the texts in terms of astronomical phenomena. Indices are included to facilitate the study of this large corpus.

This volume presents the edition and translation of first-millennium BC Babylonian omens derived from the appearance and movements of the planet Jupiter. David Pingree’s introduction and astronomical commentary shows the extent of the Babylonian scholars’ knowledge of astronomical phenomena.

This third fascicle of Babylonian Planetary Omens contains the edition of all cuneiform texts dealing with the planet Venus known to us. Most of these tablets are kept in the British Museum; the large number of unpublished texts were transliterated and the previously published texts were checked and collated from the originals. The texts are accompanied by translations, and each group of texts is commented upon by David Pingree from the point of view of the text history and astronomical significance. A general introduction, also by David Pingree, analyzes the descriptions of Venus that occur in the texts in terms of astronomical phenomena. Indices are included to facilitate the study of this large corpus.

The Assyro-Babylonian omen series Enūma Anu Enlil, written on seventy cuneiform tablets, bears witness to the early understanding of the mutual interactions of heaven and earth on both the physical and the religious levels. To facilitate accessibility, technical and linguistic commentaries as well as an excerpt series were compiled by the scholars of old. This ancient knowledge, which was still largely characterized by mythological concepts, was never completely abandoned, not even when the ‘calculating’ astronomy became prevalent in the first millennium B.C. The series deals in four parts with the moon, the sun, weather phenomena, and fixed stars and planets. This book offers an edition of the texts of the second half of the weather section with the accompanying material.

Neo-Assyrian and Greek Divination in War is about practices which enabled humans contact the divine. These relations, especially in difficult times of military conflict, could be crucial in deciding the fate of individuals, cities, dynasties or even empires.

This is the first book-length analysis of the techniques and procedures of ancient mathematical commentaries. It focuses on examples in Chinese, Sanskrit, Akkadian and Sumerian, and Ancient Greek, presenting the general issues by constant detailed reference to these commentaries, of which substantial extracts are included in the original languages and in translation, sometimes for the first time. This makes the issues accessible to readers without specialized training in mathematics or in the languages involved. The result is a much richer understanding than was hitherto possible of the crucial role of commentaries in the history of mathematics in four different linguistic areas, of the nature of mathematical commentaries in general, of the contribution that the study of mathematical commentaries can make to the history of science and to the study of commentaries in general, and of the ways in which mathematical commentaries are like and unlike other kinds of commentaries.

Thanks to these generous donors for making the publication of the books in this series possible: Lloyd E. Cotsen; The Maurice Amado Foundation; National Endowment for the Humanities; and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture Tales from Arab Lands presents tales from North Africa, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq in the latest volume of the most important collection of Jewish folktales ever published. This is the third book in the multi-volume series in the tradition of Louis Ginzberg?s timeless classic, Legends of the Jews. The tales here and the others in this series have been selected from the Israel Folktale Archives (IFA), named in Honor of Dov Noy, at The University of Haifa, a treasure house of Jewish lore that has remained largely unavailable to the entire world until now. Since the creation of the State of Israel, the IFA has collected more than 20,000 tales from newly arrived immigrants, long-lost stories shared by their families from around the world. The tales come from the major ethno-linguistic communities of the Jewish world and are representative of a wide variety of subjects and motifs, especially rich in Jewish content and context. Each of the tales is accompanied by in-depth commentary that explains the tale's cultural, historical, and literary background and its similarity to other tales in the IFA collection, and extensive scholarly notes. There is also an introduction that describes the culture and its folk narrative tradition, a world map of the areas covered, illustrations, biographies of the collectors and narrators, tale type and motif indexes, a subject index, and a comprehensive bibliography. Until the establishment of the IFA, we had had only limited access to the wide range of Jewish folk narratives. Even in Israel, the gathering place of the most wide-ranging cross-section of world Jewry, these folktales have remained largely unknown. Many of the communities no longer exist as cohesive societies in their representative lands; the Holocaust, migration, and changes in living styles have made the continuation of these tales impossible. This series is a monument to a rich but vanishing oral tradition. This series is a monument to a rich but vanishing oral tradition.

The reconstruction of ancient Mesopotamian medical, ritual and omen compendia and their complex history is still characterised by many difficulties, debates and gaps due to fragmentary or unpublished evidence. This book offers the first complete edition of the Assur Medical Catalogue, an 8th or 7th century BCE list of therapeutic texts, which forms a core witness for the serialisation of medical compendia in the 1st millennium BCE. The volume presents detailed analyses of this and several other related catalogues of omen series and rituals, constituting the corpora of divination and healing disciplines. The contributions discuss links between catalogues and textual sources, providing new insights into the development of compendia between serialization, standardization and diversity of local traditions. Though its a novel corpus-based approach, this volume revolutionizes the current understanding of Mesopotamian medical texts and the healing disciplines of "conjurer" and "physician". The research presented here allows one to identify core text corpora for these disciplines, as well as areas of exchange and borrowings between them.

This work provides an in-depth investigation of after-the-fact predictions in ancient Near Eastern texts from roughly 1200 B.C.E.–70 C.E. It argues that the Akkadian, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek works discussed are all part of a developing scribal discourse of “mantic historiography” by which scribes blend their local traditions of history writing and predictive texts to produce a new mode of historiographic expression. This in turn calls into question the use and usefulness of traditional literary categories such as “apocalypse” to analyze such works.

In The Divine/Demonic Seven and the Place of Demons in Mesopotamia, Gina Konstantopoulos analyses the Sebettu, a group of seven divine/demonic figures found across a wide range of Mesopotamian textual and artistic sources in Mesopotamia from the late third to first millennium BCE. The Sebettu appeared both as fierce, threatening demons and as divine, protective, figures. These seemingly contradictory qualities worked together, as their martial ferocity facilitated their religious and political role. When used in royal inscriptions, they became fierce warriors attacking the king’s enemies, retaining that demonic nature. This flexibility was not unique to the Sebettu, and this study thus provides a lens through which to examine the place of demons in Mesopotamia as a whole.