Canaanite Pronominal Suffixes at Byblos and elsewhere

Author(s):  
A. M. Honeyman

In the series of Phœnician inscriptions from Byblos, ranging in date from the thirteenth to the first centuries b.c., there appear words containing pronominal suffixes in forms not observed elsewhere, and on the basis of these forms deductions have been drawn as to the character of the dialect of Byblos and the history of the pronominal suffixes. Some of the peculiarities are more apparent than real. Thus in Byb. 5, 1.6, exhibits in place of the contracted form in or the secondary metanalytic suffix in the form in which is regular in other Canaanite dialects for the third plural masculine suffix after the dual-plural and other words in -ay or -ē. There are no instances of the 3 pl. attached to a singular noun, nor of the 3 f.s. suffix attached to a singular noun. The two examples of the 3 f.s. suffix to the dual-plural noun cannot be treated as forms peculiar to Byblos, for the 3 f.s. suffix to the dual-plural has not been found elsewhere in Phœnician, and in other Canaanite dialects it has a similar form. Erom the evidence considered below it must be inferred that double indication of the plural occurs in Canaanite feminine nouns from the twelfth century on.

1992 ◽  
Vol 85 (4) ◽  
pp. 417-432 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Chazan

Christian anti-Jewish polemics have a long and rich history, stretching all the way back to the early stages of the new faith community. Anti-Jewish treatises dot the history of Christian literature from the third century onward. By contrast, Jews seem to have been much less concerned with combatting Christianity. It has been widely noted that the earliest Jewish compositions devoted to anti-Christian polemics stem from the twelfth century. While the twelfth-century provenance of the earliest Jewish anti-Christian tracts has long been recognized, little attention has been focused on the significance of this dating. The fact that sometime toward the end of the twelfth century, perhaps in the 1160s or 1170s, two anti-Christian works, the forerunners of a substantial body of Jewish anti-Christian polemical-apologetic works, were composed almost simultaneously begs interpetation. What changes gave rise to a new Jewish sensitivity, to a need to present Jewish readers with formulation and rebuttal of Christian claims? The answer clearly lies in the enhanced agressiveness of western Christendom toward the Jews, as well as other non-Christians, a development that has been recognized and discussed extensively in modern scholarly literature. In the face of an increasingly aggressive Christendom, Jewish intellectual and spiritual leadership had to reassure the Jewish flock of the rectitude of the Jewish vision and the nullity of the Christian faith. This is precisely what the first two anti-Christian treatises, the Milhamot ha-Shem of Jacob ben Reuven and the Sefer ha-Berit of Joseph Kimhi, undertook to achieve. Given the pioneering nature of these works, it is striking that insufficient scholarly attention has been accorded to these two efforts. They surely have much to tell both of perceived Christian thrusts and of meaningful Jewish rebuttal of these challenges.


1996 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 431-449
Author(s):  
Michael Brett

Despite their period from the tenth to the twelfth century, at the height of the Middle Ages; despite their position in Egypt, at the centre of the civilization of the Near and Middle East; and despite their prominence as the third Caliphate of Islam, the Fāṭimids lack a satisfactory modern history of their dynasty. This is partly because of the length of their life, which covers the histories of so many hundreds of years; partly because of the span of their empire from North Africa to Egypt and Syria, stretching across the histories of so many regions; and finally because, at the level of Islam itself, their empire was divided between their dawla or state and their daՙwa or doctrine. The doctrine, which focused on the Fāṭimid Imām as the quṭb or pole of faith, gave the dynasty its peculiar strength and endurance. The failure of that doctrine to supersede the Islam of the schools, however, left the Fāṭimids increasingly isolated and ultimately vulnerable. Standing outside the mainstream of Islamic tradition, the dynasty's own version of its history was disregarded. Instead, its components passed out of their original context to be incorporated into the regional or universal histories of subsequent authors. Maqrīzī was alone in compiling his Ittiՙāẓ al-ḥunafā' as a history of the dynasty in Egypt, introduced by a miscellany of information on its origins and previous career.


Author(s):  
George Garnett

Chapter 5 analyses three genres of historical writing about England in the later middle ages: histories of individual churches, universal histories, and histories of the kingdom. It confirms the provisional judgement reached in Chapter 4: that with respect to the Conquest and earlier England, historical writing fossilized. There were, however, exceptions, most of which could be categorized in the first genre. These are examined in great detail, and follow on from the treatment of the unusual episodes recorded during the thirteenth century at St Augustine’s, Canterbury and Burton Abbey which were considered in Chapter 4. The first is the problematic, neglected Historia Croylandensis attributed to (Pseudo-)Ingulf, which is for the most part a fabrication of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, but which masquerades as the work of the abbot at Crowland at the end of the eleventh century, and therefore as contemporaneous with the great post-Conquest histories of England. The second is the early fourteenth-century Lichfield Chronicle, written by Alan of Ashbourn. The third is a general history of England conventionally attributed to John Brompton, abbot of Jervaulx in the early fifteenth century, and perhaps written at the abbey. All three pay a great deal of attention to (different) twelfth-century compilations of Old English and immediately post-Conquest law. This unusual characteristic accounts for their exceptional interest in the Conquest. The chapter also includes a briefer discussion of the more conventional histories into which condensed earlier discussions of the Conquest were inserted.


Ramus ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaś Elsner

The 20 poems collected together as thelithikaof Posidippus, the first surviving poems on a papyrus roll only published in 2001 and dating from the third century BCE, offer a range of spectacular new evidence for a series of issues in Hellenistic history, art and literature. The standard view is that Posidippus was probably author of all the epigrams in the roll known as P. Mil. Vogl. VIII 309, although this has been contested and by no means need certainly be the case. For my purposes here, I do assume that the interconnected poetics of the poems in thelithikado imply a single poet who is quite likely to be Posidippus, since poem 15—independently anthologised in antiquity and known through a manuscript tradition—was attributed to Posidippus in the twelfth century by the Byzantine poet and grammarian John Tzetzes. Historically speaking, the fact that so many of these poems focus on gems from the east gives remarkable insight into the interchange between Hellenistic and Achaemenid cultures: specifically, they signal the prestige of treasures from the east in the Hellenistic courts. In the history of collections, they represent a very early example of exoticism in elite collecting, of the accumulation of valuables in what we may assume was a royal and non-sacredSchatzkammer, of the need for an aesthetic response (in this case through short poems) to ‘label’ and valorise the precious items in the collection. In the history of ancientWissenschaft, the poems’ use of late Classical gem-lore (exemplified in texts like theOn Stonesof Theophrastus) offers a vivid instance of the ways theoretical knowledge circulated at least in elite contexts around the royal circle.


Author(s):  
C. Philipp E. NOTHAFT

This article offers the first study and critical edition of the Liber de motibus planetarum (Lmp), a neglected Latin text on planetary theory that appears anonymously and without any clear indication of date or place of origin in nine manuscripts of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. An analysis of its sources and parallels to other Latin treatises and translations from Arabic indicates that the Lmp originated in England in the third quarter of the twelfth century. A plausible terminus post quem is provided by the appearance of similar passages in the anonymous treatise Ptolomeus et multi sapientum (1145), which can be linked to Abraham Ibn Ezra and his astronomical tables for the meridian of Pisa. The Lmp would appear to be historically significant for its relatively detailed textual and diagrammatic presentations of Ptolemy’s planetary models as composed of multipart physical orbs. While it is generally accepted that physicalized or ‘orbed’ versions of these models entered Latin astronomy through the influence of Ibn al-Haytham’s Maqāla fī hayʾat al-ʿālam (On the Configuration of the World), the early history of this idea in a Latin context has not been studied to any deeper extent. In this regard, the Lmp offers clear evidence that Ptolemaic orbs and diagrams representing them already were a part of Latin astronomy three centuries before Peuerbach’s Theoricae novae planetarum (1454).


Author(s):  
Didier Debaise

Which kind of relation exists between a stone, a cloud, a dog, and a human? Is nature made of distinct domains and layers or does it form a vast unity from which all beings emerge? Refusing at once a reductionist, physicalist approach as well as a vitalistic one, Whitehead affirms that « everything is a society » This chapter consequently questions the status of different domains which together compose nature by employing the concept of society. The first part traces the history of this notion notably with reference to the two thinkers fundamental to Whitehead: Leibniz and Locke; the second part defines the temporal and spatial relations of societies; and the third explores the differences between physical, biological, and psychical forms of existence as well as their respective ways of relating to environments. The chapter thus tackles the status of nature and its domains.


2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max Sexton

Euston Films was the first film subsidiary of a British television company that sought to film entirely on location. To understand how the ‘televisual imagination’ changed and developed in relationship to the parent institution's (Thames Television) economic and strategic needs after the transatlantic success of its predecessor, ABC Television, it is necessary to consider how the use of film in television drama was regarded by those working at Euston Films. The sources of realism and development of generic verisimilitude found in the British adventure series of the early 1970s were not confined to television, and these very diverse sources both outside and inside television are well worth exploring. Thames Television, which was formed in 1968, did not adopt the slickly produced adventure series style of ABC's The Avengers, for example. Instead, Thames emphasised its other ABC inheritance – naturalistic drama in the form of the studio-based Armchair Theatre – and was to give the adventure series a strong London lowlife flavour. Its film subsidiary, Euston Films, would produce ‘gritty’ programmes such as the third and fourth series of Special Branch. Amid the continuities and tensions between ABC and Thames, it is possible to discern how economic and technological changes were used as a cultural discourse of value that marks the production of Special Branch as a key transformative moment in the history of British television.


2014 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 127-137
Author(s):  
Tatsiana Hiarnovich

The paper explores the displace of Polish archives from the Soviet Union that was performed in 1920s according to the Riga Peace Treaty of 1921 and other international agreements. The aim of the research is to reconstruct the process of displace, based on the archival sources and literature. The object of the research is those documents that were preserved in the archives of Belarus and together with archives from other republics were displaced to Poland. The exploration leads to clarification of the selection of document fonds to be displaced, the actual process of movement and the explanation of the role that the archivists of Belarus performed in the history of cultural relationships between Poland and the Soviet Union. The articles of the Treaty of Riga had been formulated without taking into account the indivisibility of archive fonds that is one of the most important principles of restitution, which caused the failure of the treaty by the Soviet part.


2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 213-227
Author(s):  
Rosemary Hicks

A review essay devoted to Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection by Sherman A. Jackson. Oxford University Press, 2005. 256 pages. Hb. $29.95/£22.50, ISBN-13: 9780195180817.


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