Author: Merlin Stone
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2012-05-09
Total Pages: 379
ISBN-13: 0307816850
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Here, archaeologically documented,is the story of the religion of the Goddess. Under her, women’s roles were far more prominent than in patriarchal Judeo-Christian cultures. Stone describes this ancient system and, with its disintegration, the decline in women’s status.
Author: D. T. Potts
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1999-07-29
Total Pages: 528
ISBN-13: 9780521564960
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →From the middle of the 3rd millennium BC until the coming of Cyrus the Great, southwestern Iran was referred to in Mesopotamian sources as the land of Elam. A heterogeneous collection of regions, Elam was home to a variety of groups, alternately the object of Mesopotamian aggression, and aggressors themselves; an ethnic group seemingly swallowed up by the vast Achaemenid Persian empire, yet a force strong enough to attack Babylonia in the last centuries BC. The Elamite language is attested as late as the Medieval era, and the name Elam as late as 1300 in the records of the Nestorian church. This book examines the formation and transformation of Elam's many identities through both archaeological and written evidence, and brings to life one of the most important regions of Western Asia, re-evaluates its significance, and places it in the context of the most recent archaeological and historical scholarship.
Author: Elizabeth Carter
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 1984
Total Pages: 346
ISBN-13: 9780520099500
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Javier Álvarez-Mon
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-01-29
Total Pages: 868
ISBN-13: 131732983X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Amongst the civilizations to participate in the dynamic processes of contact and interchange that gave rise to complex societies in the ancient Near East, Elam has remained one of the most obscure, at times languishing in the background of scholarly inquiry. In recent years, however, an increasing body of academic publications have acknowledged its relevance and suggested that its legacy was more considerable and long-lasting than previously estimated. The Elamite World assembles a group of 40 international scholars to contribute their expertise to the production of a solid, lavishly illustrated, English language treatment of Elamite civilization. It covers topics such as its physical setting, historical development, languages and people, material culture, art, science, religion and society, as well as the legacy of Elam in the Persian empire and its presence in the modern world. This comprehensive and ambitious survey seeks for Elam, hardly a household name, a noteworthy place in our shared cultural heritage. It will be both a valuable introductory text for a general audience and a definitive reference source for students and academics.
Author: Javier Álvarez-Mon
Publisher: Penn State Press
Published: 2011-06-23
Total Pages: 512
ISBN-13: 1575066122
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The late 7th and 6th centuries B.C. were a period of tremendous upheaval and change in ancient western Asia, marked by the destruction of the Assyrian Empire, the rise and collapse of the Neo-Babylonian state, and the stunning ascent of what was to become the Achaemenid Persian Empire, the largest polity the world had yet seen. Of the major cultural entities involved in these far-reaching events, Elam has long remained the least understood. The essays contained in this book are part of a continuing reassessment of the nature and significance of Elam in the early 1st millennium B.C., with a focus on the relationship between “Elamite” culture of the Neo-Elamite period and the emerging “Persian” culture in southwestern Iran in the 7th and 6th centuries B.C. The conception of this volume goes back to the 2003 meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research that took place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where two sessions were dedicated to the rich cultural heritage of ancient Iran. It was also the first time that Iranian archaeology was represented at ASOR since the Iranian Revolution. This volume contains 14 contributions by leading scholars in the discipline, organized into 3 sections: archaeology, texts, and images (art history). The volume is richly illustrated with more than 200 drawings and photographs.
Author: Manya Saadi-nejad
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2021-01-14
Total Pages: 265
ISBN-13: 1838601570
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Anahita was the most important goddess of pre-Islamic Iran. From her roots as an ancient Indo-European water deity her status was unrivalled by any other Iranian goddess throughout the course of three successive Iranian empires over a period of a thousand years. The first scholarly book on Anahita, this study reconstructs the Indo-European water goddess through a comparison of Celtic, Slavic, Armenian and Indo-Iranian myths and rituals. Anahita's constantly-evolving description and functions are then traced through the written and iconographic records of Iranian societies from the Achaemenid period onwards, including but not limited to the Zoroastrian texts and the inscriptions and artistic representations of the great pre-Islamic Iranian empires. The study concludes by tracing survival of the goddess in Islamic Iran, as seen in new Persian literature and popular rituals. Manya Saadi-nejad demonstrates the close relationship between Iranian mythology and that of other Indo-European peoples, and the significant cultural continuities from Iran's pre-Islamic period into the Islamic present.
Author: Abdul Jamil Khan
Publisher: Algora Publishing
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 838
ISBN-13: 0875864392
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In a blow against the British Empire, Khan suggests that London artificially divided India's Hindu and Muslim populations by splitting their one language in two, then burying the evidence in obscure scholarly works outside the public view. All language is political -- and so is the boundary between one language and another. The author analyzes the origins of Urdu, one of the earliest known languages, and propounds the iconoclastic views that Hindi came from pre-Aryan Dravidian and Austric-Munda, not from Aryan's Sanskrit (which, like the Indo-European languages, Greek and Latin, etc., are rooted in the Middle East/Mesopotamia, not in Europe). Hindi's script came from the Aramaic system, similar to Greek, and in the 1800s, the British initiated the divisive game of splitting one language in two, Hindi (for the Hindus) and Urdu (for the Muslims). These facts, he says, have been buried and nearly lost in turgid academic works. Khan bolsters his hypothesis with copious technical linguistic examples. This may spark a revolution in linguistic history! Urdu/Hindi: An Artificial Divide integrates the out of Africa linguistic evolution theory with the fossil linguistics of Middle East, and discards the theory that Sanskrit descended from a hypothetical proto-IndoEuropean language and by degeneration created dialects, Urdu/Hindi and others. It shows that several tribes from the Middle East created the hybrid by cumulative evolution. The oldest groups, Austric and Dravidian, starting 8000 B.C. provided the grammar/syntax plus about 60% of vocabulary, S.K.T. added 10% after 1500 B.C. and Arabic/Persian 20-30% after A.D. 800. The book reveals Mesopotamia as the linguistic melting pot of Sumerian, Babylonian, Elamite, Hittite-Hurrian-Mitanni, etc., with a common script and vocabularies shared mutually and passed on to I.E., S.K.T., D.R., Arabic and then to Hindi/Urdu; in fact the author locates oldest evidence of S.K.T. in Syria. The book also exposes the myths of a revealed S.K.T. or Hebrew and the fiction of linguistic races, i.e. Aryan, Semitic, etc. The book supports the one world concept and reveals the potential of Urdu/Hindi to unite all genetic elements, races and regions of the Indo-Pakistan sub-continent. This is important reading not only for those interested to understand the divisive exploitation of languages in British-led India's partition, but for those interested in: - The science and history of origin of Urdu/Hindi (and other languages) - The false claims of linguistic races and creation - History of Languages and Scripts - Language, Mythology and Racism - Ancient History and Fossil Languages - British Rule and India's Partition.
Author: Georg Feuerstein
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass Publishing House
Published: 2005
Total Pages: 376
ISBN-13: 9788120820371
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In this pathbreaking book, the authors show that the ancient Indians were no primitives but possessed a high spiritual culture, which not only influenced the evolution of the Western world in decisive ways but which still hs much to teach us today. India's archaic spirituality is codified in the rich symbols, metaphors and myths of the magnificent Rig-Veda, which is shown to be much older than has been widely assumed by scholars. The present book also unravels the astonishing mathematical and astronomical code hidden in the Vedic hymns. Anyone interested in ancient cultural history, India, archaeo-astronomy or spirituality will find this well researched and cross-cultural work spellbinding and enriching.