From: owner-ane@ (ANE Digest) To: ane-digest Subject: ANE Digest V1997 #99 Reply-To: Sender: owner-ane@ Errors-To: owner-ane@ Precedence: bulk ANE Digest Wednesday, April 16 1997 Volume 1997 : Number 099 Re: ane IMPORTANT MESSAGE re Mordechai/Esther ane many thanks ane new publication ane EB Ochre ane Khazar documents ane Khazars/Koestler Re: ane Khazars/Koestler Re: ane ANE: prayer and magic ane New Book Re: ane Re: Semitic, Family Trees, and Proto-Languages ane announcement of appointment Re: ane Khazars/Koestler ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 15 Apr 1997 15:47:53 +0300 (IDT) From: avigdor horovitz Subject: Re: ane IMPORTANT MESSAGE re Mordechai/Esther Dear Chuck, Bravo! Just what we need before Passover. Victor On Mon, 14 Apr 1997, Charles E. Jones wrote: > With regret, I am forced to call a halt to the on-list continuation of this > thread. As called for in the rules those who persist in continuing it will > be removed from the list. > > -Chuck Jones- > cejo@midway.uchicago.edu > ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 15 Apr 1997 08:03:19 CST From: "EDWARD FLISS" Subject: ane many thanks Before a final halt is called to the Mordechai/Esther discussion I would like to express many thanks to all who participated in it. I have found most of the information that I originally sought and have been led far beyond what I initially expected. Peace (at last), Edward Fliss Missouri Baptist College fliss@mobap.edu ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 15 Apr 1997 15:03:55 -0700 From: Martin Bemmann Subject: ane new publication Dear list members, I would like to draw your attention to our recent publication on rock carvings and inscriptions from the upper Indus valley in the Northern Areas of Pakistan: Die Felsbildstation Shatial by G. Fussman and D. Koenig with contributions by O. von Hinueber, Th.O. Hoellmann, K. Jettmar and N. Sims-Williams in collab. with M. Bemmann. Mainz (Verlag Philipp von Zabern) 1997. (Materialien zur Archaeologie der Nordgebiete Pakistans 2) 427 pages and 136 plates, hb., price less than 200 DM. ISBN 3-8053-2027-2 The second volume of "Materialien zur Archaeologie der Nordgebiete Pakistans" is dealing with the petroglyph site Shatial, 60km west of Chilas in the upper Indus valley of Pakistan. As manifested in the rock carvings this place was a traffic junction where, during the first centuries AD, influences from Central and South Asia met. The most remarkable feature of this site is the unique concentration of more than 550 Sogdian inscriptions. Besides there are more than 400 inscriptions in Brahmi and many representations of stupas of particular quality. Some of the other engravings like tamgas, fire altars and animal drawings, too, refer to the Sogdians, a lot of other carvings show other cultural influences. Key words: Rock Art, Buddhism, Archaeology South Asia, Iranian Epigraphy, Indian Epigraphy, Onomastics. - -- Martin Bemmann Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften >Felsbilder und Inschriften am Karakorum Highway< Karlstrasse 4 Postfach 102769 D-69017 Heidelberg -- Germany phone: ++49-6221-543276 fax: ++49-6221-543355 e-mail: martin.bemmann@urz.uni-heidelberg.de ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 15 Apr 1997 16:29:57 +0300 (IDT) From: Ianir MILEVSKI Subject: ane EB Ochre Does anybody know ochre lumps from Early Bronze Age archaeological contexts in the southern Levant, including Jordan? Thanks in advance, Ianir Milevski Research Archaeologist IAA ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 15 Apr 1997 10:44:32 -0400 (EDT) From: ddtesten@sas.upenn.edu (David D. Testen) Subject: ane Khazar documents John Baker has inquired about Hebrew documents stemming from the Khazar state. Two of these are published with translation and commentary in Norman Golb and Omeljan Pritsak, Khazarian Hebrew Documents of theTenth Century (Cornell UP, 1982). David Testen Linguistics University of Pennsylvania ddtesten@sas.upenn.edu ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 15 Apr 1997 11:29:08 -0400 (EDT) From: dsandmel@ccat.sas.upenn.edu (David Sandmel) Subject: ane Khazars/Koestler The book by Arthur Koestler is "The Thirteenth Tribe," which is a mixture of history and Koestler's own particular social/political agenda. When I looked into the issue about 20 years, Koestler's book was not well regarded. (There was an interesting article about Koestler in The New Yorker earlier this year.) I also saw an article in The New York Times (sometime in the last 6-9 months or so) regarding a new scholarly theory about the origins of Yiddish. The argument (*if* I recall correctly) is that Yiddish is structurally much more Slavic than it is Germanic, despite the fact that the vocabulary is predominantly Germanic. This suggests, it is argued, that Jews in Eastern Europe may have first come there from points east (Eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor), along with their "Judeo-Slavic" language. When Jews later migrated from Western Europe, their Germanic vocabulary was imposed on this "Judeo-Slavic," the result being Yiddish. The point of all this is that it may point to a larger impact by the Khazars (and Eastern Jewry in general) than had been originally believed, and, as it turns out, may lend support to Koestler's theory. (This is a brief synopsis from memory; I may not be representing the argument fairly.) David Sandmel University of Pennsylvania dsandmel@ccat.sas.upenn.edu ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 15 Apr 1997 12:10:15 -0500 From: Peter Daniels Subject: Re: ane Khazars/Koestler The argument about Yiddish as a Slavic language is Paul Wexler's; he has set it forth in 2 or 3 monographs published by Harrassowitz (in a series of which he is the editor, not surprisingly). His claim is that Yiddish is not a Germanic language, but that it is a Slavic language--specifically Upper Sorbian (it may have been Lower Sorbian--I don't know the difference between them, but they are regularly recognized as distinct languages). His arguments are, I'm sorry to say, unintelligible. He goes further to claim that therefore, Israeli Hebrew is a Slavic language - --because he regards Israeli Hebrew as relexified Yiddish (i.e., what Ben Yehuda et al. did was to continue to speak their native grammar but using Hebrew words instead of Yiddish words). This theory is superficially attrac- tive--because IH syntax is much more like "Standard Average European" than it is like Biblical Hebrew--but is untenable on the level of morphology. Only some derivational morphology of Yiddish is found in Hebrew; the inflec- tional morphology is normal Semitic. "SAE" is a term devised by Benjamin Lee Whorf to designate all the familiar languages, which share a lot of grammatical patterns, as distinct from the American languages (Hopi, Navaho, etc.) that he was mostly concerned with. It is well known that syntactic features are the easiest borrowed among neighboring languages (e.g. SOV order in Akkadian absorbed from Sumerian and in Ethiopic absorbed from Cushitic), so descriptively we needn't think that IH is a Germanic language, i.e. Yiddish in Hebrew clothing. Peter T. Daniels ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 15 Apr 97 15:41:02 -0500 From: David Lorton Subject: Re: ane ANE: prayer and magic Cynthia Edenburg posted an inquiry regarding prayer and magical texts, in which she included the following definition of the latter: > "ritual texts that >manipulate divine powers for the benefit of the user or clients and that >are generally looked on as illegitimate by official or mainstream cults >in the society" It needs to be questioned, I think, whether we can make a sharp distinction between religion and magic, with magic having a pejorative connotation, in the ancient Near East. For ancient Egypt, at least, Robert K. Ritner has questioned the distinction; see _The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice_, Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization 54 (Chicago, 1993). David Lorton ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 15 Apr 1997 15:22:19 -0500 (EST) From: "Thomas D. [Tom] Hall, THALL@DEPAUW.EDU" Subject: ane New Book Some time back there was some discussion of world-systems theory. The following is now published. Rise and Demise: Comparing World-Systems Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas D. Hall Boulder, CO: Westview Press. For prices & ordergin see Tom Hall's Home Page: http://www.depauw.edu/~thall/hp1.htm link to books Abstract Spanning ten thousand years of social change, this book examines the ways in which world-systems evolve. A comparative study of stateless societies, state-based regional empires, and the modern global capitalist political economy, it reveals the underlying processes at work in the reproduction and transformation of social, economic, and political structures. Rise and Demise offers far-reaching explanations of social change, showing how the comparative study of world-systems increases our understanding of early history, the contemporary global system, and future possibilities for world society. Table of Contents Preface ix Introduction 1 Part I: Concepts & Definitions 1 A Hundred Flowers Bloom: Approaches to World-Systems 11 2 Defining World-Systems 27 3 Two, Three, Many World-Systems 41 Part II: Explaining World-System Evolution 4: New Territories: The Problem of Incorporation 59 5: The Semiperiphery: Seedbed of Change 78 6: Iterations and Transformations: A Theory of World-Systems Evolution 99 Part III: Investigations: Cases and Comparisons 7: A Very Small World-System 121 8: The Unification of Afroeurasia: Circa 500 B.C.E. - 1400 C.E. 149 9: The Europe-Centered System 187 10: Cross-System Comparisons: Similarities and Differences 200 PART IV: Conclusions 11: The Transformation of World-Systems 233 12: Conclusions, Questions, Speculations 247 Notes 255 Glossary 271 References 276 Index 309 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 15 Apr 1997 17:36:57 -0500 (CDT) From: "Clyde A. Winters" Subject: Re: ane Re: Semitic, Family Trees, and Proto-Languages You make a valid point that the "historically embedded linguistic instances are profoundly influenced...by their social mode of reproduction/transmission". This is an important consideration of any study of languages and the people who speak them, both ancient and modern because of the social role of language. We must never forget that children learn their native language through their interaction with adults who transmit culture to their offspring. Lev Vygotsky, the Russian Educational Psychologist has proven that the languages we speak are determined by the langauge spoken byu our parents. Since the speakers of any language are heavily influenced by the people in their community , it is only natural that it will shape our perceptions of culture. The reality of the expert (parent) transferring language and speech to the novice (their children) lends excellent support your observations on the nature of the social influences on language. C.A. Winters ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 15 Apr 1997 19:33:00 -0600 From: "Michael Fox" Subject: ane announcement of appointment The Department of Hebrew and Semitic Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is pleased to announce that Cynthia Miller, currently at North Carolina State University, has accepted an appointment as assistant professor of Hebrew. Dr Miller, who received her doctorate from the University of Chicago, specializes in Biblical Hebrew linguistics and philology. She is the author of _The Representation of Speech in Biblical Hebrew Narrative"_ (HSS 1996). ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 16 Apr 1997 09:22:11 +0300 (IDT) From: avigdor horovitz Subject: Re: ane Khazars/Koestler Dear Peter, I am not a linguist, so I can't speak as one in deciding whether Hebrew is Semitic of indo-germanic or anything else. All I can say is that in Modern, Israeli Hebrew, there are is practically no new morphology, although certain forms have fallen out of use. As a matter of fact, attempts have always been made to assimilate loan words and new lexemes into the old forms. So we find even "to fax" = lefakses", using the pi`el conjugation with a new quadraliteral root- and this is only one of many recent neologisms. There can be not doubt that in modern Hebrew many old forms have deteriorated in all facets of the language, and that there has been an inundation of new forms etc. But all this cannot be regarded as sufficient cause for "reclassification" of the language. Yiddish has of course influenced modern Hebrew, but it has also colored modern English. And English and many otehr languages have left heavy marks on Hebrew. By the way, when evaluating the linguistic affiliation of modern Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew should not be the only yard stick as it is in the hands of people who may know only it. Let it not be forgotten the biblical Hebrew itself is a complex admixture of locally, socially, and chronologically distinct dialects and registers, and that Hebrew continued to be used without stop as both a literary and spoken language ever since. Mnay aspects of modern Hebrew reflect post-biblical phenomena. So let's not be hasty. Victor Hurowitz ------------------------------ End of ANE Digest V1997 #99 *************************** Back issues are available on the Oriental Institute World-Wide Web (WWW) site at: http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/ANE/OI_ANE.html