Recently added articles from The Journal of the American Oriental Society:
The cultic versus the forensic: Judahite and Mesopotamian judicial procedures in the first millennium B.C.E.(Report)
Apr 01, 2008; ... Throughout most periods of ancient Near Eastern history, religious rituals frequently played an important role in the resolution of legal disputes that were brought to trial. It appears that judges would sometimes make use of them arbitrarily but often when they felt the available evidence ...
The imperative forms of Proto-Semitic and a new perspective on Barth's Law.(Report)
Apr 01, 2008; ... 1. INTRODUCTION Over a century ago Jakob Barth suggested, (1) in what has come to be known as Barth's Law, that the quality of the vowel following the consonantal pronominal prefix in the G-stem depends on the thematic vowel of the verbal base, i.e., a dissimilarity between the ...
Indian disciplinary rules and their early Chinese adepts: a buddhist reality.(Report)
Apr 01, 2008; ... This study focuses on the various attitudes of Chinese Buddhist masters toward the introduction of Indian disciplinary rules in a Chinese reality, more particularly in the Chinese society of the fifth to the eighth centuries, a period that saw the full development of Chinese monastic ...
Notes on the Ahl al-Diwan: the Arab-Egyptian army of the seventh through the ninth centuries C.E.(Report)
Apr 01, 2008; ... In his foundational study of caliphal armies, Hugh Kennedy provided a thorough, interpretative framework for the profuse evidence relating to the early Islamic military establishment. (1) Repeatedly, however, he necessarily emphasized the tentative nature of the sources in general, but ...
A new terminus ad quem for 'Umar al-Suhrawardi's magnum opus.(Critical essay)
Apr 01, 2008; ... Attending to the chronological sequence of an individual author's works is a sine qua non of contemporary literary biography, one of the single most important descriptive elements that the critic should attend to in evaluating the oeuvre of any one writer. It is inconceivable, for example, ...
The horse in Indo-Iranian mythology.(Critical essay)
Apr 01, 2008; ... With focus on the mythology of the horse, the rituals in which it is involved, and the philological study of the texts (p. 13), Philippe Swennen investigates, comparing and contrasting, the physical description of the (sacred) horse in the ancient Indic and Iranian literature, the Vedas ...
A new dictionary of the Rigveda.(Critical essay)
Apr 01, 2008; ... An updating of Grassmann's Worterbuch zum Rigveda has long been a major desideratum of Vedic studies. In an age of specialization it is hard for us to imagine that a mathematician ("Grassmann's algebra") should have been the unique author of the sole specialized dictionary of one of the ...
Spice, spiced wine, and pure wine.(Essay)
Apr 01, 2008; ... The Arabs have coined a proverb ashar min qifa nabki ("more famous than 'Stop, let us weep!'") quoting the first two words of Imru' al-Qays's Mu'allaqa. This Mu'allaqa is known to have several versions, in which the number and order of lines are slightly different. The version used here is ...
Personal exile in the ancient near east.(Report)
Apr 01, 2008; ... Personal exile was an ongoing phenomenon in the ancient Near East that had a special dynamic, giving rise to its own political conventions, legal regulations, and literary reflections. While sharing some features with the mass deportations used as a policy tool by imperial powers of the ...
The five Ks of the Khalsa Sikhs.(Report)
Apr 01, 2008; ... <Pre> Sikhism, the world's fifth-largest organized religion, has more than 20 million followers. Many thousands live in New York City. We can spot Sikh men on the street by their turbans and upswept whiskers. New York Times, 18 Sept 2006 </Pre> Everyone knows a Sikh. The New ...
The Parakhyatantra, A Scripture of the Saiva Siddhanta.(Book review)
Apr 01, 2008 ... The Parakhyatantra, A Scripture of the Saiva Siddhanta: A Critical Edition and Annotated Translation. By DOMINIC GOODALL. Collection Indologie, vol. 98. Pondicherry: INSTITUT FRANCAIS DE PONDICHERY / ECOLE FRANCAISE D'EXTRBME-ORIENT, 2004. Pp. CXXV + 669. This first edition and ...
Temple to Love.(Book review)
Apr 01, 2008 ... Temple to Love: Architecture and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Bengal. By PIKA GHOSH. Bloomington: INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2005. Pp. xv + 255. In the seventeenth century, a religious movement centered on the worship of the divine couple Krisna and Radha, and named Gaudiya ...
Hemacandras Kavyanusasana, Kapitel 1 und 2.(Book review)
Apr 01, 2008 ... Hemacandras Kavyanusasana, Kapitel 1 und 2. By LEO BOTH. Drama und Theater in Sudasien, vol. 2. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2003. Pp. 372. The Kavyanusasana (hereafter KA) is a work on poetics by Hemacandra, the prolific twelfth century scholar and monk whose works on ...
Languages and Nations.(Book review)
Apr 01, 2008 ... Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras. By THOMAS R. TRAUTMANN. BERKELEY and Los Angeles: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 2006. Pp. xv + 304, plates. $49.95. Nine years after publishing Aryans and British India, historian Thomas Trautmann offers a ...
Historical Dictionary of Ancient Southeast Asia.(Book review)
Apr 01, 2008 ... Historical Dictionary of Ancient Southeast Asia. By JOHN N. MIKSIC. Historical Dictionaries of Ancient Civilizations and Historical Eras. Lanham, Maryland: SCARECROW PRESS, 2007. Pp. xlix + 430, maps, figs., illus. At first I was perplexed by the publication of this book. With ...
Representations of Political Power.(Book review)
Apr 01, 2008 ... Representations of Political Power: Case Histories from Times of Change and Dissolving Order in the Ancient Near East. Edited by MARLIES HEINZ and MARIAN H. FELDMAN. Winona Lake, Indiana: EISENBRAUNS, 2007. Pp. xii + 212, illus. $39.50. Collected here are eight essays on the ...
Abwehrzauber und Behexung.(Book review)
Apr 01, 2008 ... Abwehrzauber und Behexung: Studien zum Schadenzauberglauben im alten Mesopotamien. By DANIEL SCHWEMER: HARRSSOWITZ VERLAG, 2007. Pp. xix + 330. [euro]58. If an ancient Mesopotamian suffered from headaches, pains in limbs or trunk, dizziness, nausea, numbness, or paralysis, the ...
Bible, Map, and Spade.(Book review)
Apr 01, 2008 ... Bible, Map, and Spade: The American Palestine Exploration Society, Frederick Jones Bliss, and the Forgotten Story of Early American Biblical Archaeology. By RACHEL HALLOTE. Piscataway, New Jersey: GORGIAS PRESS, 2006. Pp. xiv + 220. $99. Today, when events in the Middle East are ...
A History of the Ancient Near East.(Book review)
Apr 01, 2008 ... A History of the Ancient Near East. By MARC VAN DE MIEROOP. 2nd edition. Oxford: BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, 2007. Pp. xxi + 341, illus. $31.95 (paper). For many years, teachers of survey courses on the ancient Near East were faced with a dilemma: which book to use as a textbook? ...
Kleines Worterbuch des Ugaritischen.(Book review)
Apr 01, 2008 ... Kleines Worterbuch des Ugaritischen. By JOSEF TROPPER. Elementa Linguarum Orientis, vol. 4. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2008. Pp. xv + 193. [euro] 29.80 (paper). During the past few years, a number of comprehensive works on Ugaritic lexicography have seen the light of day ...